


The Master Debaters

by cosetties



Category: Les Misérables (2012), Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Schönberg/Boublil, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Background Relationships, Blow Jobs, Communication Failure, F/M, M/M, References to Underage Drinking, Underage Sex, debate au, i just wanted them in suits and ties okay
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-06-27
Updated: 2013-07-29
Packaged: 2017-12-16 07:53:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 25,379
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/859724
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cosetties/pseuds/cosetties
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Enjolras had never anticipated actually doing anything about the Grantaire Situation before he shows up to a round half-naked, still wearing those (not attractive at all) glasses that have been bugging Enjolras all week. But there's a rampant debate case thief on the loose, and it's not looking so great for the team, much less two communication-challenged boys in love.</p><p>(No, the title is not a bad innuendo at all.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. flash me

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Grantaire wears glasses, Heidegger is mentioned, and there is a non-date where two lovely people walk in the rain.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title comes from "flashing" someone during a round, which is when you give someone your flash drive during cross-examination so that they can look at your case and ask you questions.
> 
> Chapter is most E/R fluff, but there's more like debate-related conflict next chapter.

It starts, Enjolras decides, because of those glasses.

They’re nothing special in particular. Not like the neon pink, Bedazzled sunglasses Courfeyrac insists on wearing whenever he goes onstage to accept a trophy. They’re just black, square-frame glasses, sitting on the bridge of Grantaire’s nose, one lens higher than the other as if they had never been properly fitted to his face. Knowing Grantaire and his inability to properly care for himself, they probably hadn’t been.

Enjolras hadn’t even really noticed them at first, engrossed as he is in the debate case he’s currently writing. Grantaire usually sits in the back of the room anyway, content to make his contribution to team practices halfhearted at best. In fact, his lack of motivation had led to the Great Hobbes Debate of 2009, when even the seniors’ eyes were on them, two first-year—novice—debaters who seemed to know so much about the theory of human thought but so little about its practical application in interpersonal relationships.

It had taken Combeferre, a heaping plate of cookies from Cosette, and a near-fatal car accident to pull them apart. Grantaire and Enjolras still bristle every time Hobbes is brought up.

Over the years, they’ve gotten better at hiding their hostility toward each other, and on some level, they’re even _friends_ —it’s hard not to bond during the long hours of waiting during tournaments, practices, and nearly endless trips to travel tournaments. Enjolras is in the practice of underestimating the guy, but Grantaire has a knack for translating laziness into constructive cynicism during rounds, and it’s practically a rite of passage on the local circuit to have a case torn apart by Grantaire. That and being flirted with by Courfeyrac.

As Enjolras types, Cosette flutters—no, really, she’s that good—to his side and leans over his shoulder to see the case he’s currently writing. Her fingers drum a steady beat on his lower back as her eyes scan the affirmative case. Cosette’s blonde hair and big eyes hide a brain even Enjolras is afraid to mess with, and if she says his case sucks, his case probably sucks.

“I like your aff,” she finally decides, squeezing his butt, and it’s the oldest joke in the book, but Enjolras still glares at her until she begins giggling. Cosette abuses her power to smooth over any irritation with her pure adorableness, but she’s not apologizing for it anytime soon.

“I feel violated,” he deadpans.

Cosette clutches a hand to her heart. “Oh, dearie me, did I threaten your virtue?”

Courfeyrac, overhearing, bursts into the chorus of Like a Virgin. He’s no Madonna, but he tries, he really does—it’s just that Enjolras wishes his friend’s attempts at singing weren’t so goddamn painful.

“I was thinking of getting your help to write a kritik? I think I ran my last one too many times. I know that running a K at a local’s a bad idea, but…”

Cosette brushes her blonde hair out of her eyes. “No, yeah, I get it. You should have one ready. Why don’t you just ask Grantaire? Isn’t anything slightly in the field of cynicism his area of expertise?”

That’s when Enjolras sees him—the stranger.

(Enjolras isn’t one for overdone dramatics, but that’s what this moment feels like, when Enjolras turns around and Grantaire’s seat is occupied by someone he’s never seen before in his life.)

“What—where’s Grantaire?” Courfeyrac’s manic laugh really should have clued him in, but Enjolras’s eyes are still on the stranger because he’s reading _Heidegger_ off his laptop at breakneck speed, spreading his case to a beat Enjolras feels himself tapping out subconsciously. Existentialism isn’t quite Enjolras’s cup of tea, but the man pushes the square-frame glasses up his nose before they slip off, and Enjolras is fixated by the movement.

Then the spell is broken.

“Oh,” he breathes, reeling back in his chair, _“oh_.”

Cosette laughs. “Bossuet dropped Grantaire’s contacts into the toilet. I didn’t ask why he had them, but I learned a long time ago not to ask when it comes to Bossuet.”

Courfeyrac sets the humorous interpretation script he’d been marking down on the table and stretches. “Ah, thank God Grantaire brought the stereotypical nerd factor back to this team. I was beginning to think we were all too attractive to really do debate.” He swings his feet onto the table, nearly kicking Enjolras’s laptop out of the way. “When I say ‘we’, I mean ‘me’.”

“He looks a lot different,” Enjolras admits.

Of course, Cosette and Courfeyrac immediately jump on his case.  

“Does Grantaire’s new professorial look turn you on?” Cosette winks and nudges his shoulder suggestively. “If I’d known this, I would have told him to lose the contacts sooner.”

“Or is it the Heidegger? I thought you _hated_ Heidegger. Too pessimistic about the world—“

“Oooh, I bet it’s a combination of the glasses and the Heidegger? I bet that’d be your bedroom talk. ‘Our aim in the following treatise is to work out the question of the sense of being, and _fuck me harder, right there._ ’?”

_“Oh, criticize ontology to me, baby.”_

If Cosette weren’t so good at Policy debate and Courfeyrac at his various speech events, Enjolras would have found new friends by now, seriously. “You,” he tells Courfeyrac, “have no right to criticize me when your love life has yet to be sorted out.” Courfeyrac’s eyes shift over to Combeferre for a brief second, but Enjolras continues, “And besides, you don’t even do debate. Do you seriously just know Heidegger quotes off the top of your head?”

Courfeyrac huffs. “Debate _and_ speech team. And you know you laughed at that Winnie the Pooh oratory I did, so don’t you go all high-and-mighty debater looking down on speechies.”

Enjolras ignores him. “And you,” he says to Cosette, “are not allowed to criticize my romantic pursuits when you’re dating a boy who couldn’t even talk to you for nine months without being hit in the head first.”

“So they’re ‘romantic pursuits’ now? From where I’m sitting, you secretly want to get into Grantaire’s pants, Grantaire wants you to get into his pants, both of you would greatly benefit from a lack of pants, but neither of you are smart enough to learn the power of communication. Ironic, really, since we’re on a _debate team_.”

Courfeyrac and Cosette high-five, and Eponine looks over from where she’s helping Marius with a case. “Are you two bullying Enjolras again? I told both of you. One day, Enjolras will grow balls and finally do something about Grantaire. Today is not that day. Neither of you can grow balls for him.”

Enjolras is in the process of thanking her for stopping his two friends when he realizes what she’s just said.

He doesn’t thank her.

Because she’s wrong anyway.

* * *

Enjolras had always known, on some deeper level, that Grantaire is a valuable asset to the team. It’s hard to tell though, when he shows up to practices with breath that stinks of alcohol and spends the waits between rounds not with his teammates but with less than trustworthy members of rival teams doing god-knows-what. Debaters are good at pretending they’re not constrained by rules, but Enjolras’s mentor when he’d first joined the team had lost every scholarship he’d earned in the course of his debate career when he’d been caught smoking pot in an empty classroom. Enjolras just didn’t know until now that he _cared_ about whether or not Grantaire would suffer the same fate.

Their team has set up on one of the tables near the back, monopolizing the use of the outlets and practically inviting in hate from other teams. Eponine and Cosette are bent over a laptop and Combeferre’s trying to get his AP Physics homework done, but everyone else is already wandering around campus in a search for better food than the crap in the cafeteria. Enjolras can usually judge how well-run a tournament is by its food, and the soggy pizza isn’t a good sign.

When Enjolras is in the middle of Big Time Rush’s newest album, Grantaire pulls up a seat next to him at the table. Enjolras purposely picked the spot farthest from his friends so that he can enjoy his strict pre-round regimen of re-reading his cases while aggressively listening to bad pop songs in peace.

He definitely doesn’t, _no he does not_ , notice that Grantaire is still wearing the glasses.

“Running a K at a local’s pretty risky, isn’t it? What with the parent judges running around.”

“I was just thinking about it,” Enjolras defends, “I’m probably running a stock utilitarianism case. Util’s pretty foolproof.” He pauses. “And why do I have to explain my decisions to you? You’ve never cared before.”

“Because I know I look really smart in these glasses, and I wanted to see if I could get you to respect me if I looked like your ideal perfect debater.” Grantaire leans close, the lenses of the glasses almost brushing against Enjolras’s eyelashes. “Is it working?” he says, his voice low.

“I’ve always respected you,” Enjolras retorts, but Grantaire shakes his head. He’s still smiling though, like he’s used to it by now, as if Enjolras’s heated admonishments to _pay more attention_ or _put that bottle down_ have become the status quo.

Grantaire is smart—he really is. He’s well-read, he has to be. He likes knowing what something is before he rips it apart with his words, but he’s just never looked the part until now. Even when he’s in tournament formalwear, he manages to emanate an air of not-quite-put-together, like the professionalism is a thin surface that would disappear with a quick scratch.

He looks different now, though. Clean. Well-ordered. Definitely _not Grantaire_.

Enjolras can’t tell whether he likes the fact that a pair of glasses managed to change his appearance so drastically, but then he remembers the Heidegger, and _oh._

This is probably a problem.

“What’s with the glasses anyway?” Grantaire gives the room a cursory glance as he taps his fingers on the table. “Ten people have asked me who I am. I don’t look that different, do I?”

Enjolras makes a noncommittal sound but otherwise doesn’t answer.

“Oh man, you suck as a self-esteem booster.”

“What was I supposed to say?” That he likes the glasses a lot but also wants to see Grantaire in the rumpled clothes he manages to get away with wearing, looking like he’s still half asleep? That the glasses draw attention to his eyes but that Enjolras would really, really like for Grantaire to take them off now because their blue makes Enjolras want to do bad, not very Enjolrassy things?

But he’s not in the business of scaring his teammates when he needs them to win rounds, so he refrains.

“How about ‘Oh Grantaire, those glasses perfectly accentuate your very, very blue eyes. I want to gaze upon your lovely visage all day, now that you look adequately debater-esque. Also, you remind me a bit of the Tenth Doctor, but he’s totally beating you in the hair department because David Tennant.’”

“It seems like you’re doing enough complimenting on your own,” Enjolras says dryly.

“You’re right. I must have you mixed up with Jehan. God forbid you actually pay attention to something other than debate.”

Montparnasse’s school arrives, and unfortunately, decides to set up next to theirs. As Claquesous and Babet argue over who should get the laptop stand, Montparnasse nods to Enjolras and Grantaire in greeting. Enjolras has never liked Montparnasse much—he relies on his good looks and silky voice to win rounds, and whenever they debate in front of lay judges with a lack of experience, it’s like a battle of pretty. He’s nice enough when he tries, and Grantaire and Eponine have given him a seal of approval, but they’ve never been great judges of character.

“Hey, remember what we decided last week?” Montparnasse tells Grantaire.

“Oh. Oh, _right_ ,” Grantaire says, starting, and Enjolras doesn’t like the way the other boy is eyeing Grantaire. “I gotta go,” he tells Enjolras. He swings his backpack over his shoulder and wiggles his fingers at Enjolras in a wave.  

“Wait, don’t you have a round to get to?”

“Stop being responsible and live a little. It’s a _local_. It’s not like you want to be here either, and I don’t know why Valjean’s making us go. I’m already qualified for state, and you can get the state points you need later.”

Even though Enjolras secretly agrees and wishes that he were debating on the national circuit instead of being forced to put up with incompetent judges—local tournaments have a habit of employing parent volunteers who don’t know the difference between a value and a standard—and opponents who are only slightly higher up on the competence scale, he says, “We really shouldn’t risk it. We only have a couple of tournaments left.”

Most national circuit debaters attend locals to qualify for state near the end of the season, but after Bahorel and Feuilly had gotten screwed over the year before by a local judge who didn’t understand a word of their case, Lamarque, their coach, had decided to infringe on Enjolras’s rights to a happy and fulfilling debate season.

“Suit yourself,” says Grantaire. “Good luck with your next round. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do!”

Considering the fact that Grantaire had only halfway-accidentally cursed out one of his judges for being a “glorified douchenozzle” during a round, Enjolras doesn’t really think that limits him very much.

* * *

“But what’s the impact?” Marius asks, his head bent over the stacks of paper Eponine has lain out in front of him. Marius usually does Public Forum debate, notorious for being the joke debate event, but Lamarque insisted Eponine and Cosette had some unhealthy codependency thing going on and decided they debate with other people until state. Eponine had partnered with Marius, and Enjolras doesn’t know which is worse for her, the fact that he’s training a guy who she used to be in love with or that Marius is _Marius._ His heart is in the right place, but Marius doesn’t nearly have the guts or the snark to do policy debate.

Eponine hits the back of his head and grabs his hair lightly, forcing his face near the laptop screen. “What does it say in big letters?”

“Um, nuclear war.”

“What will it _always_ say in big letters?”

“Um…nuclear war?”

“Right. If we get a resolution about transportation, all of our arguments’ impacts will be nuclear war. If we get a resolution about immigration, they’ll still be nuclear war. Hell, if the resolution is about _bunnies,_ all of our arguments will somehow lead to nuclear war. Nuclear war is bad. People die. No impact is greater than fucking nuclear war.”

Enjolras, returning from a very satisfying round where he managed to load the negative with burdens he couldn’t answer, joins them at the table. “What about extinction?”

“Yeah, but nuclear war goes boom-boom. Judges like boom-boom.”

Marius groans and shifts down further in his seat. “I don’t see why I couldn’t have debated with Cosette instead. This would make the training go by so much easier.”

“I think it has something to do with the fact that you can’t really debate when you’re staring into each other’s souls or whatever it is you and Cosette do.”

Enjolras is thankful the table is mostly empty—almost everyone’s in a round. More room for him to lay out Combeferre’s evidence, the cards he’d cut from various sources. Enjolras pretty much debates paperless at this point, but Combeferre’s a traditionalist, and Joly, his debate partner, can’t exactly bring laptops anywhere near his boyfriend anymore. Bossuet breaks everything.

Sometimes, Enjolras is really, really glad he chose to do a debate event that doesn’t require a partner. Combeferre and Joly had wasted a collective three thousand dollars on technology before realizing that the best cure for excessive money-spending would be to keep Bossuet away.

“How was your round?” Eponine asks Enjolras absently as she dictates the words Marius is struggling to catch up with.

“Stop going so fast,” he moans, “it’s like you’re speaking in German or something.”

“Pontmercy, you _understand_ German though. No, wait, that’s actually a good idea. Write our entire second contention in German—if we talk fast enough, no one will ever know.”

“It was okay.” Enjolras plays with the strap of his laptop bag before sucking in a deep breath. “I don’t like Grantaire. I _really_ don’t like Grantaire.”

“I thought Cosette was plain the first time I saw her, back in second grade,” Marius says, unhelpfully, and Enjolras says as much. “Oh come on, Enjolras. It’s not like you feel the same way about Grantaire as I do about Cosette.”

Enjolras gulps. “I really don’t like Grantaire,” he repeats.

“Uh-huh,” Eponine says in the tone she uses whenever she’s going to humor Enjolras until he realizes she isn’t paying attention.

“He’s annoying, loud, obnoxious, rude, and he never listens to me.”

“Yes.”

“I don’t even know why he joined debate. He’s good at it, but he doesn’t care.”

“You said it, girl.”

“I had to share a bed with him for the Berkeley tournament, and I woke up with him koala-hugging me. He has horrible morning breath.”

“How scandalous.”

“He doesn’t believe in anything, I believe the world can change, and we are entirely wrong for each other.”

“Wronger than Brad Pitt naming any future children of his ‘Arm’.”

“I’m in love with Grantaire, aren’t I?”

Eponine finally looks at the way he’s slumped down in his seat, dejectedly drawing invisible pictures on the tabletop. The usually formidable debater looks like a little kid whose puppy has just died, and _goddamn_ if it isn’t the most adorable thing she’s ever seen.

“Yeah, you kind of are.”

That’s when Grantaire comes back, arms linked with Cosette. They’re singing Single Ladies, and Cosette, for the life of her, can only halfway manage the dance in her tight pencil skirt. Grantaire’s half supporting her, half trying to dance himself. Grantaire’s glasses are askew again, even more so than before. Enjolras blushes a deep red and decides that his newest goal in life is to pretend to be working on his laptop as resolutely as possible.

Eponine watches the proceedings with a bemused smile. “Oh, for the love of God. Cosette was right. You just want to pants-less cuddle him, don’t you?”

Enjolras doesn’t deny it.

* * *

In retrospect, considering Courfeyrac’s penchant for stripping and Grantaire’s complete lack of propriety, Enjolras should have expected it. He’s in his last preliminary round of the day—postings had gone up early and he has a bye his next round—and he’s looking forward to the much-needed half-sleep he’ll attempt to fall into back at their cafeteria table as he waits for everyone else to be done with their rounds. If Enjolras weren’t required to return to school in district transportation, he’d have driven home, but the school district serves to mess with his need for sleep, so he’s going to have to make do with a hard tabletop as a pillow.

They’ve acquired a bit of an audience—strange but not unheard of in preliminary rounds. Enjolras has a bit of a reputation for either giving really great speeches or making people cry really great tears. Either way, Enjolras’s rounds are a must-see.

He’s in the middle of a truly inspired second affirmative rebuttal when Courfeyrac bursts into the classroom like the music of angels, the light of the sun, wearing nothing but tight, white briefs hugging the ass he’s shaking at the audience. Grantaire is right behind him, wearing boxers decorated with rubber duckies.

“What the _hell_?” Enjolras says, but the asshole judge—college kid, hipster, probably completely unsatisfied with his sex life—waves his hand as a signal to go on, and Enjolras only has three minutes left to not waste wondering why his friends are insane. He’s been spreading for his entire debate career—speaking quickly to overload an opponent with arguments is an inherently satisfying endeavor—and it comes in handy now. “My opponent never answered my attack on her standard, so you can extend that argument…”

While Enjolras continues his speech, Courfeyrac tries to speak above him, capturing the audience with an easy smile and a very obvious flex of his abs. “My friends, senior year is a year of change, of endings, of beginnings. It is the year of frolicking footloose and fancy-free in your underwear through the hallowed halls of some unfortunate high school. I urge you, ladies and gentlemen, to join us melancholy seniors in our quest to unbind the shackles of our oppression and strip away the chains that have restricted us for far too long.” Everyone stays silent and still, and Courfeyrac coughs awkwardly. “Said chains are your clothes, by the way. By my calculations, you guys should have started stripping five seconds ago.”

A small, timid girl raises her hand tentatively. Courfeyrac’s smile is blinding as he calls on her. “Um,” she whispers, “can’t we get arrested for public indecency? Or something?”

Courfeyrac lets out a defeated sigh. “We’re not actually naked, so I’m pretty sure they can’t do anything.”

“But what if we get disqualified?”

“I’d think getting disqualified for rejecting the shackles of a fault-ridden society would be honorable. Don’t you, Grantaire?”

Suddenly, all eyes are on the dark-haired man, he holds his hands up, palms out. For the first time since Courfeyrac and Grantaire ran into his round, Enjolras is very aware that Grantaire is in nothing but his underwear, and his voice wavers as he continues giving his reasons for the judge to vote for his side. “Don’t ask me. I’m just here because Courfeyrac promised me pizza.”

“Seriously? You’re supposed to show a little support here. I’m trying to foment revolution.”

“I’m pretty sure that’s Enjolras’s job,” Grantaire says.

“…Now, if you cross-examine my second contention with the negative’s— _don’t pull me into this, I’m not participating in your shenanigans, Grantaire you should put clothes on now_ —you can easily see that I meet her value criterion better than she does…”

Grantaire has a very nicely-muscled stomach, Enjolras thinks mildly.  

Then: did I say that out loud?

Courfeyrac’s whooping in laughter, and Grantaire’s blushing, as if suddenly realizing his state of undress. Enjolras can’t find it in him to make eye contact with either of them.

The shy girl raises her hand again, and she actually works up the energy to speak without Courfeyrac having called on her—he’s still laughing too hard. “Excuse me, but this is a question for the affirmative? Did you just say that your friend has a nice abs? I just wanted to clarify.”

“…In addition, her second subpoint under contention two— _I did not say that, you all heard me wrong, the glasses messed with my thinking_ —lacks a warrant…”

“Grantaire, I think you have a not-so-secret admirer.” Courfeyrac elbows Grantaire suggestively, but Grantaire’s still staring at the ground in an obvious state of shock. “Oh come on, aren’t you going to do the whole chick flick slow-mo run up to Enjolras now?”

“Um.”

“You two are no fun.” Courfeyrac pouts, stamping his foot. Turning back to the audience, he says, “Since my friends are obviously conspiring against my happiness and you lot won’t strip, will you at least give me your phone numbers? Senior year’s also the year of having semi-public sex at debate tournaments.”

There’s a momentary silence, but the one shy girl breaks it by frantically scribbling her number on a torn piece of notebook paper and hurling it at Courfeyrac. After a minute, the room is filled with a flurry of flying paper balls, and Courfeyrac waves his arms in the storm, catching the ones he can easily pluck from the air.

“…Christ, _stop_ , I’m trying to give a speech here—I urge you, judge, to vote affirmative.” With one second left on the clock and too many thoughts flying through his head, Enjolras decides to end his speech with a very impassioned, “Grantaire, I checked postings so I know you have a bye next round too, we should get pizza for dinner or something while we’re waiting for everyone else, okay? Actually, that’s not a question, you’re going to agree, good.”

Thank God for spreading practice at debate camp.

Enjolras is breathing hard, and he drops back into his seat, all talked out. The smile Grantaire shoots him makes it worth it though.

The judge’s mouth has been hanging open, but he regains his composure now. “Best. Rebuttal. Ever.”

* * *

The neighborhood around the school is not the best, and it’s already dark when they leave through the back doors. Lamarque doesn’t actually approve of his debaters leaving campus during tournaments, but what he doesn’t know won’t hurt him. Groups of debaters mill around the stores and restaurants near campus—some guy has even come back from the pet store across the street with a new turtle—and the ones Enjolras knows shoot him questioning looks. It’s no secret that he and Grantaire butt heads over the simplest things, and well.

Luckily, Courfeyrac decided that clothes aren’t nearly as binding as he’d claimed when their coach is yelling at him to put them back on, and he’s allowed Grantaire to go out to dinner fully clothed. This dinner is nothing groundbreaking or new, now that Enjolras thinks about it. People who finish rounds early simply prefer to avoid bad tournament food and eat off-campus, and he’s pretty sure he’s been stuck with Grantaire on food runs before. Never actual dinner though.

They run into Bahorel, who had graduated the year before and now judges for extra cash.

“Did you pay him?” Bahorel asks Grantaire after he looks Enjolras up and down.

_“No.”_

Bahorel high-fives Grantaire.

Enjolras raises an eyebrow inquisitively, but Grantaire dismisses it. “Don’t worry about it. Bahorel’s just being Bahorel.”

They decide to go to an Italian place ten blocks away, and it’s probably not their best idea, but Enjolras can hardly even feel his new shoes pinching his feet when they’re finally seated and Grantaire looks at him with an amused expression.

“You did _not_ just order a salad,” Grantaire says, scandalized. “Seriously, who actually eats healthy when they’re at debate tournaments? The more calories, the better, I say.”

“It’s near the end of the local season. You can’t just eat pizza and—did you really just order fettuccini alfredo for the second weekend in a row—and expect to not get a heart attack.”

When their food comes, Enjolras liberally drowns his salad in ranch dressing.

Grantaire’s laughing as he spears his pasta with a fork. There’s already a smudge of cream sauce on the corner of his mouth. “Right, Enjolras. What you’re having is so healthy.”

“I’m merely compensating for what happened in my last round today. I think I deserve to pig out a little after you ruined my last speech.”

“I saw your ballot. You won anyway. Courfeyrac’s fight with Combeferre totally didn’t ruin your chances of going to state this year or anything.”

At this point, Enjolras isn’t even sure what Courfeyrac and Combeferre _are_ anymore. All he knows is that, once in a while, Courfeyrac will show up to a meeting red-faced, Combeferre will refuse to speak, and the next thing he knows, Courfeyrac will be doing something big to grab Combeferre’s attention. It’s a vicious cycle, but Enjolras, as the guy who is apparently attracted to a serendipitous combination of Heidegger and hipster glasses, really can’t judge.

“You got lucky,” Enjolras says, even though he knows that he thoroughly destroyed his opponent’s argument in his first rebuttal, and that last speech had been more for show than anything. Telling who won a debate round is usually fairly easy, and when your opponent looks like he’s on the verge of tears, it’s even easier to tell. Enjolras just has that effect on people.

Debate is draining. Kids go into it wanting to come out lawyers or great speakers, some of them even thinking they’re going to change the world with words one day. But after reading too much Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard, and Sartre, and conflicting philosophies, it’s hard to keep up a front of optimism and idealism. Enjolras has known too many debaters who come out of high school never wanting to touch debate again. He thinks, sometimes, when he sees Grantaire falling even further and further into cynicism, that’s what happened to the man in front of him.

After four years of debating, Enjolras still isn’t sick of it—not of the way he’s learned to twist words, the way he can easily captivate an audience, the sheer amount of _learning_ he’s done these past few years. Out of the constraints of high school debate, he still thinks he can do some good in the world.

Which is why he and Grantaire are currently fighting.

“I want liberty, not pure anarchy. We give up the same amount of rights to each other and to the government—“

Grantaire points his fork at Enjolras. At one point, they’d managed to switch meals, and Grantaire had scraped off Enjolras’s pool of dressing to pick at the lettuce while Enjolras is currently wolfing down his fettuccini alfredo. “You’re totally assuming that the government is going to protect the rights of the people. People are naturally bad at protecting others’ rights when equality is forced upon them—we’ll always want more sovereignty.” Grantaire narrows his eyes.  “Did you just throw up Rousseau again? Seriously, how many Rousseau cards do you _have_?”

“At least I don’t have an entire folder on my laptop dedicated to Kant.”

Grantaire snorts. “That’s only so I can see Marius blush every time someone purposely mispronounces his name.”

“I wish you would believe in humanity.”

Grantaire is unfazed—they’ve had this conversation so many times before. “I wish you would stop having so much goddamn faith in an inherently flawed species. Nobody’s perfect, we gotta work it, everybody makes mistakes, or however that song goes.”

Lightning flashes in the sky, and Enjolras heaves a sigh. “Hate to end this argument early, but we should probably get back before anyone wonders where we are.”

“Yeah, I’ll just—“ Grantaire pats his pockets frantically as his eyes widen. He turns his pants’ pockets in and out as if what he’s looking for will magically appear with each new try. “Shit. I must have left my wallet in my coat. The one I lent to Courfeyrac.”

“Don’t worry about it. I can pay.” And even though Enjolras has paid for his friends before, too many times to count—a debate team is a codependent bunch—this time, it feels different.

“It’s raining,” he says suddenly.

“Yes, that’s what happens when too much water accumulates in clouds, and—oh. _Fuck._ It’s raining outside.”

For two people usually so eloquent—seriously, if Grantaire’s rants were included in a book, Enjolras would only have to flip to the impenetrable walls of text to see where Grantaire shows up—they’re decidedly bad at choosing words now. Nonetheless, some form of silent communication has them running out of their seats at the same time, and they stagger toward the door of a restaurant, nearly knocking over an old lady in the process.

“Ten blocks,” Grantaire groans when he sees the downpour outside. Thunder, as if hearing him, booms. “Can you get anyone to pick us up?”

Enjolras already has his phone out, rapidly texting whoever he can find. “Anyone who’s debating at this tournament had to come by bus. Bahorel drove up here, but he isn’t picking up. And I’m not asking Lamarque to drive the bus out here to pick us up.”

“Would you rather catch pneumonia?”

“It’s only ten blocks. And look, it’s lightening up.” The weather here is pretty unpredictable, and the rain is barely a sprinkle now, the sun trying to peek out from behind the dark clouds. “I bet the rain will stop soon.”

It doesn’t.

Unfortunately for Enjolras and Grantaire, they realize this when they’re two blocks into their trip, when it doesn’t make sense to go back and look for alternative transportation they may not find anyway.

“You really shouldn’t make bets you won’t win.” Grantaire’s tired tone reflects Enjolras’s mood. His shoes squish uncomfortably, his clothes are soaked through, and his only comfort is that he has a hoodie to pull over his head and attempt to keep out most of the rain. “If I’m sick and can’t debate tomorrow, I’m blaming you.”

“You hate waking up at six in the morning. If you have an excuse to not wake up tomorrow, you’ll be thanking me.”

“You seem terribly blasé for someone who actually enjoys debating.”

“Maybe I have other things on my mind.”

Right, like the fact that the rain is making Grantaire’s shirt almost see-through. Things like that.

A dog barks in the distance, and it’s such a loud disturbance in the otherwise silent night that Grantaire jumps. “Did you—did you hear that?”

“Yes, I really think a domesticated pet is going to escape from its fenced backyard and eat you,” Enjolras says sarcastically.

“It’s dark, and raining, and we’re in the sketchiest neighborhood I’ve ever been in for a tourney. Excuse me if I’m experiencing some paranoia. This is all your fault, you know. All, all your fault. If you hadn’t been in that room, we wouldn’t be here, catching our deaths in the cold, cold air, right now. Are you aware it’s January?”

“Do you ever shut up?”

“I don’t know—can you keep my mouth otherwise occupied?”

At least the cold is a pretty good cover for the coughing fit that ensues.

Grantaire stops suddenly in the middle of that cracked stretch of sidewalk and slides his shoes off his feet, stuffing his wet socks into his pockets.

Enjolras’s tone is mildly horrified, but he shifts back and forth on his feet, his shoes itching to join Grantaire’s. “Are you fucking insane? We don’t even know what we’re stepping on.”

Grantaire spreads his hands out to catch the rain and gives his body a little spin to test out the newfound liberation from his wet shoes. “But the threat of accidentally stepping on a rusty nail is what makes life exciting.”

“Joly will kill you. And I’m pretty sure you can’t debate if you have tetanus.”

Grantaire winks conspiratorially. “Joly will never know.”

The wink is for Enjolras alone, and he is suddenly aware he’s walking on a dark, rainy street with only Grantaire to keep him company. Grantaire, who’s always looked for as many loopholes in debate rules as he can, who had joined Enjolras in their two-man boycott of ties freshman year, who is currently telling him to feel sidewalk cracks beneath his feet and risk injury from accidental puncturing.

He kicks off his shoes, and Grantaire grins widely.

They walk barefoot like that, blisters forming, splinters digging into the pads of their feet. Grantaire keeps up a steady monologue, with only a few interjections from Enjolras. They stay away from heavy topics, and before he knows it, they’re bursting through the front door of the school, still clutching their stomachs in laughter at a knock-knock joke Grantaire had stolen from Courfeyrac. He doesn’t remember what it is or if it was really funny at all, but Grantaire’s laugh is a beautiful sound.

“We’re a fucking cliché,” Grantaire says. Enjolras agrees. “We just walked ten blocks _barefoot_ in the rain. Did we just suddenly land in the Notebook?  Not that The Notebook made me cry or anything.” Grantaire’s rambling now, still high on the smell of rain and the pain in his feet that’s only slowly making its way to his brain. “You paid for dinner, like what a gentleman, I totally feel like I’m being wooed. This almost feels like a date. Or something.”

Enjolras stiffens, water still dripping from his hair, because they must have very different ideas of what tonight was if Grantaire didn’t think that was real. Grantaire notices the hesitation, of course he does, he always notices Enjolras, even when he looks like a wet dog. The earlier air of togetherness dissipates.

“I’m sorry, I forgot I was talking to pure marble. Sorry for insinuating that you may have a heart,” Grantaire says bitterly.

“I had a lot of fun tonight,” Enjolras says because three simple words are hard to force from his throat. And with anyone else, it may have been enough to rectify the situation, to have them laughing at another bad joke. But this is Grantaire, and Grantaire has the worst self-esteem of anyone Enjolras has ever met.

“You don’t have to say that.” When Enjolras reaches a hand out to touch his arm, Grantaire flinches away. His voice slips back to the faux-conversational tone he uses to mask hurt—Enjolras is used to it by now, should really be worried by how used to it he is. “What was tonight, anyway? Take the pathetic, cynical drunk out and make him feel better about himself for a couple of hours before he remembers that he isn’t allowed to love a god?”

“Do you ever just _listen to me?”_

Of course, Montparnasse chooses right then to interrupt.

“Grantaire, where’ve you been? I’ve been looking for you everywhere.” Clutching a cigarette in his hand, Montparnasse eyes both Enjolras and Grantaire, in similar states of disarray. A unpleasant grin stretches across his face. “Did Enjolras finally decide that you’re good enough for him?” he drawls, drawing in a smoke.

“What the hell, ‘Parnasse? Do you have to ruin everything?” Enjolras says angrily.

Grantaire’s shaking his head, already putting the shoes and socks back on his feet. A few minutes spent under a dryer in the bathroom, and all evidence of their night will be gone. Enjolras’s chest hurts. “I’m pretty sure this was ruined before it even started. I was fooling myself. Goodnight. I hope you don’t catch a cold.”

Enjolras watches Grantaire walk away, his clothes already drying.

* * *

When they get on the bus, Grantaire sits as far away from him as possible.

“What happened to you tonight? Did you walk outside?” Combeferre slides into the seat next to him and takes in his disheveled appearance. Enjolras hadn’t bothered to put his shoes back on, and there’s a cut on his big toe. “Put a Band-Aid over that. You’re going to get an infection.”

Enjolras ignores his advice. “I’m really bad at talking to people.”

Combeferre mutters something that sounds like, “I should have known.” He puts an arm around Enjolras’s shoulders and lays his head on his shoulder. “This is about Grantaire, isn’t it?”

“How did you know?”

“I heard that you asked him out on a date tonight, except you didn’t tell him that it was a date. I advise you to clarify in the future, considering how often you and Grantaire misconstrue information from each other. You could be telling him to give you some Locke cards, and he’d think you were telling him to dance the can-can.” Enjolras groans and buries his face further into Combeferre’s shoulder.

“I thought he knew.”

“This is Grantaire we’re talking about. It’s his natural inclination to question every nice thing that comes his way.”

“So what do I do?”

“You talk to him. And this time, you actually _talk_.”

Enjolras lifts his head, realizing, “If you found out about what happened, you must have talked to Courfeyrac. Does this mean you two are done fighting?”

The corner of Combeferre’s mouth lifts minutely. “I suggest you worry about your love life instead of mine. Now, sleep.”

* * *

Enjolras wakes up the next morning with a cough and an infection. Debate tournaments are two-day affairs, and he’s going to miss the elimination rounds.

“Oh, shit.” Then he coughs again.

The sun’s already up, so Enjolras probably missed his first round. His mom left a note on his nightstand about not wanting him to exert himself, and he should really give her a lecture about his autonomy, but the blankets are so warm. Hell, he can’t even remember the last time he’d had a Saturday to himself. Pulling the blankets over his head, he settles back into sleep.

Before he’s even comfortable again, his phone rings.

Trying to extricate himself from the blankets is a struggle, and he’s about to hang up after a quick “hello, sorry, gotta sleep,” but Eponine’s frantic voice stops him short.

“Chief, we have a problem.”

He’s still halfway snoring.

“A _debate-related_ problem.”

Enjolras is in his car and driving to the tournament in five minutes flat.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Heidegger quote is taken from his book Being and Time. I totally understand that two people wouldn't get byes (when you don't have to debate because of the ways the pairs have been set up) in the same event, but we're just going to pretend that this tournament is really, really sketchy.
> 
> Just to clarify, here are the events that the boys do:
> 
> 1\. Enjolras and Grantaire: Lincoln-Douglas (LD) debate, a one-on-one debate about philosophy  
> 2\. Cosette, Eponine, Joly, Combeferre: Policy or Cross-Examination (CX) debate, a two-on-two debate about policy  
> 3\. Marius and Bossuet: Public Forum (PF) debate, a two-on-two debate about a current issue (because this form of debate is only ever judged by inexperienced, or lay, judges, no one really takes it seriously although it’s gotten hard too)  
> 4\. Bahorel: did CX with Feuilly the year before but he graduated  
> 5\. Feuilly: because he can’t find a debate partner, he does speech events like extemp and oratory, the former of which is a memorized speech you’d have 30 minutes prep for, and an oratory is what it sounds like  
> 6\. Courfeyrac: he does acting events and speech events and he’s basically just good at everything  
> 7\. Jehan: mostly acting events, which are also called interp events
> 
> I’ll go into stuff in detail in the fic if it becomes relevant, but if there are a couple of references that I don’t explain, it’s probably not relevant to the understanding of the fic anyway.


	2. i heard you give great oral...interpretation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Les Amis discuss debate case thievery, Courfeyrac tells a bad joke, and there is bad coffee. (Also, things get fixed.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm really not happy with this chapter, but I don't think staring at my laptop longer would have made me a better writer, so. Expect about this long between updates - I'll try not to make you wait more than a week. This is a test in perseverance for me. 
> 
> Chapter title comes from oral interpretation events, which is when you read a piece of poetry or prose out loud and...interpret it. Orally.
> 
> Is every chapter title going to be a bad debate-related innuendo, you ask? Well, yes.
> 
> Thank you to extravagantlygaygrantaire on tumblr, who looked over this. :D

Enjolras does not talk to Grantaire.

He is far too busy ranting to his team to do so.

When Enjolras arrived on Saturday, looking like he’d just run a marathon, his first instinct had been to scan the room for Grantaire. As much as the other boy wanted to forget what happened the night before, there was a hastily-bandaged, throbbing cut on Enjolras’s foot that proved that he was indeed foolish enough to traverse potentially life-threatening sidewalks in the rain, and whatever Grantaire’s lack of self-esteem said, Enjolras wasn’t having any of it.

He is, oh God, he is a debater, goddammit, and he will debate the shit out of Grantaire’s demons if he has to.

Courfeyrac threw him a casual, “Dude, work out more,” and the fact that it was Courfeyrac and not Grantaire who teased him first emphasized Grantaire’s absence even more. He wasn’t surprised. Grantaire had a habit of avoiding serious confrontation, actual confrontation that consisted of more than _I will kick your Kantian ass_ and _don’t you dare quote Nietzsche on me._

Eponine shot him a withering glare, and sometimes, Enjolras really hated how many mutual friends he and Grantaire have. But before he could dwell on what exactly Grantaire had told Eponine, Combeferre had pulled him to the side and explained the situation. Enjolras fumed for two days, but now he’s ready to address the issue—with a set of handy index cards.

Last time he’d been so righteously angry at another team, Montparnasse had insulted his hair again. Enjolras tries to avoid predictability, but Montparnasse has figured out a solid process for riling Enjolras up before rounds: insult his hair, insult his politics, and flirt with him a little. Needless to say, Enjolras doesn’t respond very well to advances from other teams’ debaters, much less one so hell-bent on sleeping with everyone.

(Courfeyrac gets a get out of jail free card because he doesn’t go around with a rose in his mouth, and that wins him I’m-not-a-pretentious-dick points.)

“Citizens,” he begins, and everyone groans. Enjolras invoking French Revolution-era equalization tactics can only mean that shit is about to get real. The last time this had happened, Courfeyrac had somehow ended up in a Public Forum round reading the lyrics to Thrift Shop as an affirmative case for a resolution about the expenses of a college education. “As you know, a tragedy befell us this past weekend.”

“Enjolras,” Feuilly begs, “Please just get straight to the point. We were there when you started yelling, remember?

If by “yelling,” Feuilly means “blowing up with the force of an exploding sun" (or the equivalent, Courfeyrac whenever Cosette threatens to stop baking him cookies), then he supposes that yes, he did start yelling. Enjolras, miffed, reorganizes the index cards he’s written his speech on. He hasn’t even gotten to the three-paragraph anecdote about his dead cat—there’s an analogy in there, he swears—and he’s already been interrupted.

He can push forward with the speech, but judging from the number of coffee cups, bleary eyes, and bad postures in the room, no one really wants to hear a speech right now. Don’t kick a man when he’s down, and all of that. Besides, he’s painfully aware of Grantaire’s absence from the meeting, and the lack of teasing for his index cards sucks the fun out of having index cards in the first place.

“Someone’s been giving our cases out. From what I can tell, there’s one person, maybe a group of people, selling them. Combeferre and Joly were hitting this team from Polk, and they had our aff every detail of our plan, and arguments against them.”

“I wrote a counterplan just for a mock round I did with Combeferre and Joly, and they had that too.” Eponine, usually in heated discussion with Cosette during meetings, looks exhausted, and the dark circles underneath her eyes stand out against her pale skin. “It was a perfect negative constructive. We couldn’t win.”

“The Dobie team ran Eponine and Marius’ own counterplan against them,” Bossuet adds.

“Then—can’t we talk to the Polk coach? Maybe…” Marius trails off, uncertain.

Eponine laughs bitterly. “Yeah, we’re totally going to go up to a coach and tell him to stop doing something that’s helping him win when everyone’s trying to get state points.” Eponine softens when Marius’s face falls. “No, no, Marius, I didn’t mean to snap. I’m just really fucking stressed.”

Enjolras continues, “There’s no way to prove we wrote those cases first, and to be honest, people pull this shit at tournaments all the time when they try to scope out other people’s cases. It’s just never happened to us before.”

“They know everything we’re going to run, everything we’re going to do…” Eponine says. Cosette pulls Eponine to her and rubs a comforting hand over Eponine’s arm before her anger can build, but Eponine isn’t one to be silenced with a few quick touches and smooth words. “Whoever did this is going to fucking pay. I sure as hell don’t want to write new cases—not this late in the season.”

Jehan looks up from where he’s Googling acting pieces. In spite of—or because of—the occasion, he’s braided baby’s breath into his hair. “Enjolras, you said give. Did you really mean that one of us could be giving out information? One of Les Amis?”

With so many unpronounceable French last names on one team, it’s a wonder their opponents hadn’t nicknamed them worse, and really, there were plenty of not-so-nice words they could have alliterated with “French.” Jehan, after hearing Enjolras speak of his save-the-people plans, had suggested “Les Amis de l’ABC,” Grantaire had loved the pun, some Polk girl had overheard, and the nickname had spread to the point where they’re rarely referred to by their school name anymore.

The name is only partly right—Les Amis’ friendship transcends friendship itself, which sounds like a paradox, but there’s nothing paradoxical about fitting in more with a ragtag team of debaters than with Enjolras’ own flesh and blood, and it’s a shared sentiment. There’s a collective wince when Jehan voices his question.

Enjolras doesn’t have to say it—Enjolras doesn’t want to say it. They keep track of all their flash drives, they don’t write cases with other teams, and theirs is probably the most secretive of the teams in their district. There’s very little chance of anyone getting into their files unless that that getting into was assisted by someone on the inside.

Suddenly, it’s very important to change the wording in one subpoint of the third contention in his case, or maybe it’s just important to avoid his friends regarding each other with suspicious eyes.

* * *

There is coffee.

Unfortunately, it’s a rip-off of Starbucks, branded Sparbucks in some administrator’s quest to avoid copyright infringement while cleverly integrating the school’s mascot, Spartans, into every goddamn thing it sells. As a school, they should really be striving for historical accuracy, and Enjolras is pretty sure Spartans never drank coffee.  

The coffee’s watered-down, and there’s a distinctly off taste to it, but there is coffee with a smidgen of caffeine, and Enjolras will take what he can get.

He doesn’t want to be debating—as team captain, he should be snooping out the leak. But Combeferre had taken one look at his record and declared it too risky for him to skip another tournament.

Stuffing Enjolras into a button-up shirt and tie, Combeferre handed him a hastily-written stock affirmative case and a skepticism negative case, telling him to work his magic. Enjolras isn’t feeling too magical this morning, but he’s on his fifth cup of coffee, which is making him want to pee but is also doing its job of firing up his neurons.

Early Saturday mornings are always chaotic, especially compared to the slow pace of Friday prelims. After that horrendous Monday meeting, the team has come to an unspoken agreement to ignore the possible mole and go on the way they’ve always gone on.

Courfeyrac still practices his backflips too close to other people’s laptops. Marius and Cosette still make doe eyes at each other while others try to eat their unhealthy breakfasts. Feuilly still draws pictures of Poland on Jehan’s arm while Jehan writes poetry verses on Feuilly’s.

They fit in with the normal early-morning hubbub. Girls are still hustling about, trying to fix last-minute wardrobe issues. There’s still a long line of sleepy debaters in front of concessions. Montparnasse still ditches Gueulemer in favor of striking up a conversation with Jehan about his favorite death quotes as Grantaire nods intermittently.

Enjolras most certainly does not think too much about how Grantaire decided to show up on the bus to the tournament after a week of missed practices, and as far as he’s concerned, Grantaire isn’t still wearing those glasses at all.

Before Enjolras can settle into his own routine of grumbling while scrolling through the news, Joly and Bossuet nearly knock him over in a mad rush to reach the table. Bossuet has Joly’s laptop in his hand, and they’re grappling over it, Joly trying standing on his toes to reach the laptop Bossuet has held out of his reach. In between unsuccessful hops, Joly manages to gasp, “It’s my laptop.”

“Yeah, well.”

It takes them five minutes to work out an effective compromise—Joly will type while Bossuet stands watch to make sure the other boy doesn’t run off with the prize—and they pull up Facebook.

Bossuet dithers about behind Joly’s shoulder, and they’re both anxious, rocking back and forth on the soles of their feet. Joly, red-faced, looks like he wants to shove his boyfriend away but keep him close at the same time. “Shit—okay, what’s her name?”

“Musichetta.”

“No last name?” Joly asks, annoyed. But his fingers are already typing on the keys, and a girl’s Facebook pops up—there aren’t too many Musichettas out there. Her profile picture displays a debate team, suited up, their arms linked together in a sign of solidarity. She’s short and curvy, with hair that reaches her waist and the brightest smile in the crowd.   

“We literally met the perfect girl,” Bossuet dreamily explains over his shoulder as he’s waiting for the school’s crappy WiFi to do its magic. “Perfect laugh, perfect voice, perfect everything.”

Feuilly looks between the two. “I thought you two were still in the honeymoon phrase. I caught you two making out in a closet at our last tournament.”

Bossuet nods absently, but both he and Joly are stalking Musichetta’s Facebook wall and give no sign that they’ve heard.

Courfeyrac backflips straight into Combeferre, and somehow, Combeferre ends up falling into Marius’s arms. Perhaps bruising your potential significant other isn’t the best way to woo someone, but Courfeyrac has never been one to follow conventionality.  Combeferre and Marius are a tangle of limbs, and even Enjolras, supposedly oblivious turtle that he is, can see the jealousy in Courfeyrac’s eyes when Marius reaches out to fix Combeferre’s tie and straighten his blazer.

“Now would be a great time to apologize.” Marius, who was in the process of helping Claquesous with Spanish homework, is picking up his scattered papers.

He’s acquired a reputation as the guy who will help anyone who asks, and, combined with his intelligence, he’s become everyone’s unofficial tutor. Claquesous has a uniformly dark wardrobe, and sometimes at night, Enjolras swears he just disappears. He’s heard stories that Claquesous is in the witness protection program and that his real name isn’t Claquesous at all, but it’s all speculation. He thinks. It’s a testament to Marius’s ability to put up with people.

“I’m not apologizing for _art_.” Courfeyrac spins on his heel, which would have looked dramatic if he hadn’t spun straight into Gueulemer.

Twenty minutes later, Enjolras will find Courfeyrac holding an ice pack to Combeferre’s head, which is very nice of him and all, but Enjolras can’t see how icing someone’s head will help heal a bruise on his ribs.

“Marius!” Eponine comes barreling through the small huddle near the table and grabs Marius’s wrist. “We need to prep, _now_. We’re hitting Polk again, and I need you to know our new case.”

Marius grabs a stack of his notes and shoves them towards Claquesous. “Just take my Spanish notes,” he says apologetically. “I’ll help you after this round.”

Amusement flashes in Claquesous’ dark eyes, too amused for subjunctive conjugations and an essay on Don Quixote, but Enjolras has no time to dwell. He has a round to go to and people to make cry.  

* * *

Lay judge this time. Middle-aged, dressed in a crisp blouse she thought would be the appropriate attire for judging at a debate tournament, flowy flowered skirt that swings along with her legs. She bites the pen she’s holding between her teeth and gives up all pretense of taking notes, confused as she is by the proceedings of the round.

It’s fortunate, Enjolras supposes, that the judge is too fixated by the words coming out of his opponent’s mouth. Enjolras is fuming, and he can’t even pretend to be hiding it.

As soon as the round is over, he intercepts his opponent, blocking his path to the main hallway. Enjolras is too feminine and slender to truly be imposing, but his eyes blaze, and the taller boy stops dead in his tracks.

“Who gave you that case?” The calm in Enjolras’ voice doesn’t do much to mask his anger, and the guy shows a twinge of fear. “It was new, there’s no way it could have gotten out that quickly.”

“I just—goddammit—someone on our team just bought it off someone. I don’t do who—honest.”

“And you thought it would be a good idea to win rounds unfairly?”

The boy scowls. “Look, you lot are one of the best teams in the district. Losing a few rounds won’t do anything to your reputation. You’ll still pull off a state qual. I bet you won your other prelims, didn’t you?”

Enjolras grits his teeth. “You say that like it gives you the right to just _steal_.”

“Maybe you should stop threatening people and start asking why one of your friends would want to betray your team.”

As Enjolras gapes, the other guy makes it clear that the conversation is over. He shoulders Enjolras out of the way, and Enjolras is tempted to grab the pretentious briefcase out of his hands, but there’s no point. It’d be like killing one bee to get at the entire hive, and he needs to sneak his way to the queen.

There’s a moment, when he’s standing to debate during quarterfinals, where the doubts planted earlier start to niggle at his mind. Combeferre gives him an encouraging nod, but now his opponent is reading a negative case perfectly molded to his own affirmative, and _one of his friends did this_. Enjolras is good at faking impassive, he has to be, but his eyes involuntarily search out Combeferre’s, and suddenly, he just wants to throw up.

He loses the round, but when he sees his opponent’s triumphant expression, he doesn’t even have the heart to tell her that it wasn’t so much her stolen case but his own traitorous mind that defeated him.

* * *

Enjolras finds Grantaire sketching in the nook in front of a side door. The light shining on the little alcove is the only brightness in the dark hallway, and Jehan could probably write a million metaphors to describe the moment Enjolras finds Grantaire. But Enjolras is no poet, so when he walks, slowly, towards the other boy, he is only thinking _those goddamn glasses_ and not _there is a light at the end of the metaphorical tunnel after all._

Like so many others, Grantaire has always had interests outside of debate—that’s what keeps him sane. Drawing is just one of them, along with kickboxing, fencing, dancing, and whatever else Grantaire has hidden up his sleeve. How he has time for everything Enjolras will never know.

“You haven’t been to practice all week.” Enjolras isn’t sure if he’s welcome to sit down or not, but Grantaire moves over just an inch to make room, and Enjolras gratefully joins him against the wall.

“I had notecards. You have a million words for my notecards, but you weren’t there.” There’s a hint of hurt in Enjolras’s voice that he tries to conceal, but Grantaire has always been a practiced decoder of Enjolras’s emotions. No matter how good of a job Enjolras thinks he’s doing, Grantaire will always know.

“Enjolras, I have a million words for everything you do. You could be sleeping, and I’d have a million words for it. You’re very you.” Grantaire refuses to look up from his sketchbook, but at least they’re not ignoring each other anymore. His pencil traces the figure of a girl with long hair and a wide smile, and Enjolras is fascinated by the rapidity with which Grantaire’s pencil makes its way across the page. “I heard you downed in quarters.”

“Stolen case,” Enjolras says, not taking his eyes off Grantaire’s hands.

“I know what you’re thinking, and it wasn’t me. I may not care about much, but I care about our friendship, all of Les Amis.”

“I wasn’t—“ His head pounds when he remembers the exact reasons why Grantaire would think Enjolras doesn’t trust him. There are a lot of them. “—I wasn’t thinking that at all.”

“Mhm,” Grantaire mumbles, but it’s clear he doesn’t really believe Enjolras. The glasses threaten to fall off again, and before Enjolras can overthink his actions, his fingers are curling around the frame and situating them properly on that crooked nose, still slightly askew in a way that’s very Grantaire. He blames Courfeyrac and his lack of respect for the concept of personal space.

Grantaire freezes. “What are you doing?”

He really should be as fluent in this as he is when reading from a case, but the sound that comes out of his mouth is less a “yes, please date me” than an incoherent mumble.

It seems to do the trick okay though, because Grantaire looks amused. “I may have been informed by a very smug Courfeyrac that my actions on Friday night may not have been completely rational.”

“Aside from the smugness, he was very correct in his assumptions.”

The corner of Grantaire’s mouth twitches into a slight frown, which makes no sense, because, really, Enjolras is here stripping away his defenses, and Grantaire should really appreciate it. But here he is, frowning, and Enjolras can’t fathom why.

“Ask me who I’m drawing,” he says suddenly. He reaches a hand out to Enjolras, but stops when he thinks better of it. Enjolras begins to shake his head, and Grantaire urges, like he needs Enjolras’ prompting to explain, “Don’t ask why. Just do.”

Enjolras lets out a breath he didn’t realize he has been holding. “Who?”

“That’s my sister. She died two years ago.” As soon as the words are shoved from Grantaire’s mouth—because that’s what it sounded like, an explanation forced from his throat—his eyes close, and he slumps against the bricked wall. When he opens his eyes again, there’s a steely determination behind the usual devil-may-care exterior.

“She’s also the reason you can’t depend on me for anything—“ he shakes his head, agitated “—no, that’s wrong. Not the reason. An example, I guess. Are you getting this? You seem really confused.”

Enjolras remembers a weekend, two years ago, when Grantaire lost to a novice—his first time not breaking to elimination rounds all season. There’d been yelling and accusations questioning his commitment to the team, but Grantaire had laughed it all off with a smirk and a _you won’t ever understand._ Enjolras had marched up to Courfeyrac demanding why he’d recruited Grantaire in the first place, but it’s happened so many times in the past few years that Courfeyrac just sat him in front of a Margaret Thatcher fansite and told him to vent out his anger there.

During Enjolras’ reminiscence, Grantaire scoots away from him to leave a noticeable distance between their bodies. His eyes are glassy, and his fingers twitch, dying to pick up the pencil again, but his voice is steady. “When I was sixteen and I first got my driver’s license, I thought I could go anywhere and escape my family, you know?

“There was this one day when I was supposed to pick up Alice from dance practice, but I decided to go to this party with Montparnasse instead. I texted my dad to pick up her up, but he’d had this meeting, and Alice ended up trying to walk home. In the dark. Alone. She took the shortcut I always _told_ her not to take.”

Enjolras thinks that, in spite of all of Grantaire’s boasting, he looks so small now. “Grantaire…”

Grantaire holds up a hand. “No, let me finish. She tried calling me, left a shitload of messages telling me that she thought a group of guys were tailing her. Turns out she was calling mom and dad too—she knew they were close by. But it was a busy night, and.” Grantaire sucks in a breath. “They found her body lying in a ditch the next day. We think they mugged her, and she tried to resist. She’s always been so _small_. Easy target.”

Enjolras is quiet. Perhaps Grantaire had been waiting for a response, but there’s no indication he wants Enjolras to speak yet, and anyway, he’s picking up his pencil again, leaning his sketchpad against his bent knees and using them as a makeshift table.

“Obviously, I’m not the dependable sort. I would be cosmically bad for you and incredibly fond of pushing you away. Don’t take it personally. If the world isn’t hitting me with bad karma, I figure it’s my duty to hit myself with it. There is an infinitely wide gap between us, or whatever—“

“Adding adverbs in front of everything you say doesn’t make something truer.” Grantaire blinks, seeming to have lost his train of thought, which is _good_ , because Enjolras needs Grantaire to keep his mouth shut for once. Self-deprecation isn’t one of the more attractive uses for that mouth because, you know what, that mouth is also used for ripping his opponents’ arguments to shreds, to criticize Enjolras’s cases when he needs it, to join his friends in laughter.

“I’m not going to sit here and tell you that it wasn’t your fault. You’ve probably heard that before, from all the wrong people.” Grantaire snorts, and Enjolras knows he’s right. “But what I _am_ going to say is that you shouldn’t punish yourself for it.”

“I’m not very good at accepting that good things can happen to me,” Grantaire admits. “And now you know why. But you’ve never shown any signs of reciprocating my feelings. How was I supposed to know any different? And the fact that Courfeyrac’s more in touch with your feelings than you are says a lot about your communication skills, really.”

The sentence ends on an expectant note, and Grantaire’s eyes probe his every movement, seeing if he’s going to take the bait.

Goddammit.

“I like you, are you happy now?”

Grantaire doesn’t answer, his eyes still blank, so Enjolras’s first instinct is to stand and flee. He can already hear the next words coming out of Grantaire’s mouth, probably something along the lines of _I’m too busy hating myself_ or some shit like that.

Grantaire fixes him with an incredulous look. “You’re leaving?”

“Wasn’t the whole point of that story to instill within me a great distrust in your ability to follow through?”

“But—“ Then he’s clutching his sides and laughing so hard he hits his head against the bricks. Enjolras wills his lips to stay put and not curve up because _damn_ that is an infectious sound that he wants to hear for a long time. When Grantaire calms down, he says, “I’m a deeply selfish person.”

Enjolras rolls his eyes. “There you go with the adverbs again.”

“Shut up, adverbs are your friends. The point is, I’m selfish. I’ll take any scrap of affection you give me, no matter how small, and I’ll enjoyit. I’m giving you an out here. No hard feelings. I wouldn’t like myself very much after that trip down memory lane either.”

Enjolras’s response is simple. “I don’t want an out.”

As with any school, there’s graffiti on the walls, this time a messily-scratched “carpe diem” where Grantaire rests his head. It’s highly out-of-place on the otherwise pristine walls—this is the rich part of town—and Enjolras and Grantaire both notice the words at the same time.

With a glance at the darkening sky, Grantaire automatically corrects, “Noctem,” and Enjolras must be out of his mind because that’s what spurs him to lean down again and rake his fingers through Grantaire’s hair, holding him close. That one word, spoken with a sardonic grin and an underlying belief in the idea that nothing will ever be perfect, not even fortuitous graffiti on brick walls. Grantaire laughs because _really_ , but his hands are ghosting over Enjolras’s sides, unsure if they’re allowed to touch.

“I am going to be so, _so_ bad for you,” he warns, but to Enjolras’s ears, it sounds more like a promise. They aren’t _fixed_ exactly, but the bandage on Enjolras’s foot reminds him that temporarily solutions can lead to permanent ones.

“I give you full permission to fuck me up.”

Grantaire makes a strangled sound, and then Enjolras is pressing their lips together. They try their best, but Enjolras’s experience consists of a few awkward kisses with Combeferre and Grantaire’s previous experiences had never been with Enjolras, so there’s this business with figuring out how much pressure to apply, where they should place their hands, if Enjolras’s elbows are getting chafed against the brick wall he’s braced against.

There are no fireworks, but Grantaire’s lips are soft against his own, and _maybe_ , there are sparks that can one day grow into a full-fledged pyrotechnics show.

“I really like your glasses,” Enjolras says when they part, very seriously, because Grantaire doesn’t get complimented nearly enough, and it is his new goal in life to rectify that.

Grantaire tries to hide a smirk. It doesn’t work. “Yeah, I know. Why do you think I wore them for so long?”

“Was the Heidegger part of the plan too?”

Grantaire’s arms slide around Enjolras’s shoulders, and then there are lips against his ear. “How about this, if you ever get glasses, _you_ can talk nerdy to me.”

Enjolras ducks his head to hide his blush. That doesn’t work either. “Was this some elaborate ploy to seduce me?”

Grantaire snorts, playing with Enjolras’s curls. “No, that was two weeks ago, when I got Courfeyrac to spill juice on my shirt, so I had to take it off. That was last month, when I was trying to text you innuendoes during practice. That was the Polk tournament, when I put on debate clothes when I was still sweaty from boxing. Those were my attempts to seduce you. It’s not my fault you have weird kinks.”

That’s when Grantaire spies the coffee Enjolras has placed to the side when this conversation began. “Sparbucks, really?”

“It was the only thing they had,” Enjolras protests, “except those bottled frappuccinos from Starbucks, and everyone knows they’re just sugar and water.”

“Here’s a secret,” he says sarcastically. “We’re allowed to leave campus.”

“The last time I decided to leave, it started raining, and I ended up bleeding with a cold.”

“Weather report shows no chance of rain,” Grantaire offers hopefully.

Enjolras is fairly sure Grantaire’s lying about checking, but, “Carpe noctem, right?”

Grantaire has always known the best places for everything, even when he’s stuck at a school he’s never been to before, so he leads Enjolras to a little place on the corner of the block, the type of place frequented by college kids and starving artists. The coffee’s not perfect, and he’s had better, but anything is an improvement from the Sparbucks cup he’d left in a trash can back at the school.

Halfway through his coffee—black, medium roast—something occurs to Enjolras. “This is a date,” he clarifies. “Legitimately a date.”

“This is a date,” Grantaire agrees.

* * *

They don’t hold hands. Holding hands is for couples like Marius and Cosette, and Enjolras and Grantaire are nowhere as adorable as an actual Disney love story.

But from the way Jehan claps when he sees them, they come pretty damn close. They don’t hold hands, but Grantaire makes sure is hair’s obviously mussed from Enjolras’s ministrations, and to their friends’ inquisitive eyes, that may be declaration enough.

Les Amis have set up in the middle of the cafeteria this time, Courfeyrac’s choice, probably. True to form, Courfeyrac is already standing on top of the table, regaling the surrounding teams with a tale.

“It’s supposed to be a joke,” Combeferre explains with a sort of exasperated fondness. “We haven’t gotten to the punchline yet, but so far, our protagonist has been wallowing on a bridge, where he met up with a dancing, giant cookie that can apparently talk. The cookie fell into a lake, and the hero then managed to forget about his magical cookie.”

“It’s been _ten_ minutes, and we’ve gotten nowhere.” Feuilly’s tone is decidedly less fond than Combeferre’s and ten times more exasperated. “This is worse than his first-ever impromptu speaking round. Remember the time he was supposed to be talking about Obama’s foreign policy but started analyzing the political undertones in that Ke$ha song? Yeah, this is worse than that.”

“I wouldn’t forget about a magical cookie,” Grantaire says. “Who can forget about a giant cookie?”

Combeferre doesn’t answer his question—instead, he’s looking at the smug grins gracing both Enjolras and Grantaire’s faces. Screw it, Enjolras thinks, and then he clasps his fingers around Grantaire’s.  

Grantaire sucks in a breath in this certain way of his that Enjolras thinks he likes very much, actually, scratch that. He likes everything about Grantaire very much, from the way he breathes to the way he kisses to every goddamn thing.

Courfeyrac still hasn’t noticed them. “So the guy meets this girl, and they fall in love at first sight. The birds start singing, the flowers start blooming, the grass grows faster. Basically Marius and Cosette.” The couple in question flushes red. “They’re perfect for each other, so one day, the guy’s like, ‘I should marry this girl.’ He decides to propose to her on a bridge overlooking the city because the scene is pretty, and the water sparkles, and, Jehan, help me out.”

“It’s _your_ joke.”

“Fucking rude, man.” Jehan only shrugs, smiling. Courfeyrac continues, “Just as he’s bending down on his knee, the wind decides to fuck him over, and it blows the ring into the river. The boy and the girl are both really sad because he’s the type of guy to spend a month’s salary on an engagement ring, and they decide to wait to buy a new ring and get married. One day, when he drives by the river, on the shore, just _right_ there, guess what he finds.”

Nobody guesses, and Cosette is starting to feel bad for Courfeyrac, so she tentatively proposes, “The engage—“

A smug grin stretches over Courfeyrac’s face, like he’s been waiting for someone to say that all night. “ _No_ ,” he says, dropping his voice low like they’re about to be let in on a huge secret, “the _dancing cookie_.” He slaps his thigh and chortles, anticipating the reaction of his adoring public.

If this were a movie, there would be crickets chirping. But their lives are nowhere near interesting enough to be immortalized onscreen, so the only sound heard is Bahorel cursing Courfeyrac out for wasting his time.

Courfeyrac crosses his arms over his chest. “Seriously, it was a good joke. That was thirty minutes of my day spent entertaining you people—holy shit, are Grantaire and Enjolras holding hands?”

Bahorel, still facing Courfeyrac, chuckles. “That’s a better joke that than that entire _clusterfuck_ of a—“ He turns around, “holy shit.”

Grantaire’s cheeks are burning bright red, and Enjolras is faring no better, but there’s a bright side. At least they’re better entertainment than Courfeyrac and his giant dancing cookie.


	3. get on your knees and flow me

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There is shady business going on, Enjolras and Grantaire get lost, and Enjolras thinks Montparnasse is a dick.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm actually really proud of the title since I came up with it myself rather than stealing it off debate memes. Also, I like puns. :D "Flowing" a round means taking notes for it, and a "flow" is also what you call the notes. 
> 
> I should clarify that hitting someone (or hitting an argument) means going against it. Yes, I was confused when I first started out too.
> 
> There's a lot of coffee in this fic because that's all debaters drink other than water, pretty much, even the actors who shouldn't be drinking anything with milk (aka me).

About three things Enjolras is absolutely positive:

First, Grantaire is an amazing debater, artist, kickboxer, and occasional fencer.

Second, there is a part of him—and Enjolras doesn’t know how dominant that part might be—that thirsts for more.

And third, Enjolras is unapologetically and irreversibly going to strangle him.

It had been cute for the first ten minutes, Enjolras won’t even try to deny it. They’re still in the stage where everything the other does is mildly endearing, from tying his shoes to ranting about a novice who misinterpreted Voltaire. Enjolras had given up on trying to explain it, and the butterflies are kind of nice, flying around down there in his stomach.

But he’s pretty sure the butterflies are going to die soon from the bad singing, and he’s on the verge of speaking up when Bahorel beats him to the punch.

“Will you two _shut up_?”

After totaling his car the week before, Bahorel had complained about having to hitch a ride on a bus with a bunch of high-schoolers, which hadn’t stopped him from getting on the bus anyway. Still, Enjolras is fairly certain he’s glad for the chance to catch up with his old friends, although Courfeyrac and Grantaire’s singing probably reminded him why he’d had a dramatic countdown to graduation in the first place.  

Given their low budget, riding an air-conditioned charter bus to a travel tournament is a Big Fucking Deal, but Enjolras almost regrets being the first one to jump on the bus now. Without the loud rush of wind blowing through the open windows of a regular school bus, it’s almost too easy for Courfeyrac and Grantaire to blast the radio at the loudest volume possible.

Grantaire may be a debater, artist, kickboxer, and occasional fencer, but a singer is he is not.

“Bahorel, you’re killing my vibe here,” Courfeyrac whines as he flings himself into Bahorel’s arms and kisses his cheek, thus violating at least ten bus rules. “If I want to sing about how being twenty-two makes me want to dress like a hipster, you’re going to sit here and like it.”

Even in his vintage skinny jeans, plaid shirt, scarf, and shuttershades, Courfeyrac manages to say this without a hint of irony.

Stretching out his arms, Grantaire joins Courfeyrac in snuggling Bahorel, singing into his ear, “Everything will be alright if you keep me next to you.”

Bahorel shudders.

From the seat next to Enjolras, Combeferre cracks a small smile. “And still you put up with him.”

Hearing, Grantaire blows a kiss to Enjolras, which he pretends to ignore.

Enjolras nods at Courfeyrac. “You’re one to talk.”

Combeferre responds by smiling tightly. “It’s not like that, actually.”  

A god above, the one who gets his kicks from manipulating love lives, is probably laughing about how Grantaire and Enjolras managed to get their shit together before even Combeferre.

A laptop sits in Combeferre’s lap as he furiously types out an essay for English class, a pursuit Enjolras should theoretically be joining him in. Combeferre has always been the only debater Enjolras knows who can finish homework during a tournament while there are opponents to intimidate, cases to prepare, and strategy to be discussed. His skill is practically superhuman.

“Okay, so.” Grantaire hops into the seat in front of Enjolras and spins around to face him, hands gripping the back of the seat. “I talked to Lamarque, and you, Combeferre, Courfeyrac, and I are rooming together.”

Enjolras nods. If he and Combeferre are separated, they’ll end up texting each other about their opponents all night as they look up their records online, mapping out which rounds they have the highest chances of winning and who to look out for on postings. Locals may be warm-ups, but national circuit tournaments are the real deal. Even Courfeyrac cares enough to run through his lines a few times before rounds, the ones he probably knows by heart.

Feuilly generally takes the fourth spot, but a tired Enjolras has a tendency to hang on to his every word without shame, and Feuilly said no more after waking up to find Enjolras sitting cross-legged next to his bed, watching him snore.

But if Grantaire now has more time to twist Enjolras’s guts with his smile, Enjolras simply can’t complain.

Courfeyrac’s jaw drops in horror. “You two aren’t sharing a bed.”

“But—“ Grantaire says.

Courfeyrac twitches and snaps his fingers in Grantaire’s face. “I ain’t gonna have fornication in my hotel room.” Then, contemplating his new persona, he adds, “Word. Fo shizzle.”

Courfeyrac, as an actor—the speech part of speech and debate—is prone to falling into different roles as it suits him. They’d been treated to Valley Girl for two straight weeks when Enjolras had thought it a good idea to refuse to watch chick flicks with the rest of the team.

Marius whimpers from the back of the bus, where he’s sandwiched between Cosette and Eponine playing a rousing game of Guillotine. “Please stop. I’m scared.”

Cosette whoops in joy when she manages to kill King Louis, and really, his own girlfriend should scare him way more than Courfeyrac does.

“The only way to insure that there will be no hanky-panky,” Courfeyrac informs Enjolras seriously, “is if you and Combeferre share, leaving—“

Grantaire protests immediately. “No _way_. You grope people in your sleep.”

Courfeyrac sniffs. “You wish.”

Combeferre, only half listening, frowns at something he reads on his laptop, absentmindedly playing with the water bottle in his hand. Suddenly, he turns serious. “We can figure out sleeping arrangements when we get there. What I want to know is whether you’ve come up with suspects for who may be leaking our cases.”

Combeferre’s right, of course, he always is. With the threat of nationally ruined reputations to contend with, Les Amis have a lot more to lose than with a small local. Enjolras would be worried, but, “It’s probably just a local circuit thing. There’s no way anyone on the national circuit would run a stolen case and risk damaging his or her reputation.”

Grantaire braces himself against the back of the chair as the bus makes a particularly sharp turn, nearly knocking him into the aisle. “And what if it’s just blind faith?”

Courfeyrac frowns—he’s always been the greatest propagator of team spirit, known to implement cheesy team-building activities. Because Les Amis are full of little shits—and Enjolras means that in the best way possible—someone always winds up getting hurt as a result, a problem Lamarque never seems to pick up on. If anyone believes in the threads that bind their team together, it’s Courfeyrac.

“There’s a definite _how_ , but we have no motives.”  Courfeyrac taps his fingers on the seat. “In fact, you may even say we have _no_ -tives.”

No one laughs, but Combeferre ducks his head to hide a smile.

Pouting, Courfeyrac crosses his arms over his chest. “Seriously? Am I the only one who appreciates a good bad pun?”

Before Enjolras can explain that, no, there’s no way that even came near the realm of funny, Jehan calls out from the back of the bus, “Montparnasse texted me to tell you all good luck!”

At the mention of Montparnasse, Enjolras stiffens. Grantaire no doubt has the same text in his inbox.

“That sounds ominous,” Combeferre says, voicing Enjolras’s thoughts. No matter how many times his friends will reassure him of Montparnasse’s harmlessness, there’s just something about him.

“We can worry about debate-related things later.” Courfeyrac has his hand on the volume knob of the radio, and Enjolras doesn’t even have time to protest before Courfeyrac turns it with a gleeful smirk. “For now, loving him was red—“

In five seconds flat, Enjolras is back to wanting to strangle Grantaire.

* * *

“You’re out of your round early,” Enjolras says when he sees Grantaire sitting on the bench outside of the lecture room. He hurriedly makes a move for the empty bathroom so he can _scream_ , but Grantaire’s hand around his wrist stops him.

“You lost.” It isn’t a question.

“Is it that obvious?”

The first three rounds of the day had been alright, good even. He’d had to run all over the university campus—somehow, he wound up being the only person on the team  unfortunate enough to have rounds in four different buildings—and by the time he entered his fourth and final preliminary round on Friday, he wished he left his backpack on the bus.

Montparnasse had been waiting outside the door to the room next to him, his eyes half-closed as he reclined against a wall. Enjolras hadn’t seen the other boy in weeks, not since he and Grantaire finally sorted themselves out, and frankly, he’d forgotten how _creepy_ Montparnasse’s eyes were.

His opponent was Claire McDonald, a girl from a city a couple of hours away with a reputation for spreading too fast for lay judges and writing the most complicated cases she could get away with. He’d never hit her before, but she seemed like his kind of opponent, someone who could give him a break from the monotony of locals. Running on the high from his previous successful rounds, he had been confident he could beat her.

And then the round happened.

“What if…” Enjolras avoids Grantaire’s eyes. “…What if I become the only person ever to qual for the TOC but not _state_? Because that’s the way things are going right now.”

He’s been working on qualifying for the prestigious Tournament of Champions all season, up until the moment Lamarque had told him getting a third bid instead of the required two wouldn’t actually up his chances in the national competition later in the year. Besides, even though he can still earn state points at TOC tournaments, locals are simply easier to conquer. He, like most national circuit debaters, genuinely thought the state qual had been set in stone.

Enjolras didn’t have to contend with stolen cases at the beginning of the year though.

It hadn’t mattered before, not really. He could bounce back from a couple of bad locals, and national circuit debaters fucking up at a couple of locals is a given, considering how little locals matter in the Big Picture. But this, this is different.

Enjolras’s voice is small. “What if Claire goes off and tells people I lost without telling them _how_ I lost? This was supposed to be my comeback tournament after a couple of really shitty breaks.”

One preliminary round shouldn’t have shaken him this much, but he’s already imagining the possibilities. If someone outside of his local circuit has his cases, there must be more.

Grantaire wraps his arms around Enjolras’s shoulders, leading him to sit down on a bench. Offering comfort sitting down is simply easier than doing so standing up, it’s like a rule or something, and as someone who’s barely gotten a chance to catch his breath all day, he welcomes the respite.

“I’m sure you won’t be the only person ever to TOC-qual without state qualling,” Grantaire says.

“Thank you for your ever so helpful support,” Enjolras shoots back sarcastically.

“I try.” Something about Grantaire’s laid-back attitude rubs at Enjolras the wrong way. It’s not like _he’s_ the one with his reputation on the line—he qualified ages ago, when Enjolras felt too good to take advantage of easy locals. He wishes he could take that back now.  Enjolras tells Grantaire as much.

“Enjolras,” he brushes his fingers through Enjolras’s hair, “look, you barely cared when it happened at a local, and I’m sure even with people knowing your cases—“

“—I even wrote new ones for this tournament—“

“— _even_ your new ones, you’ll still qualify.”

Enjolras breaks away from Grantaire suddenly. “But what if this happens at state too? Or the TOC? It’s our senior year, we’re never going to get another chance to go out with a bang.”

Fortunately for him, Grantaire does not cash in on the unintentional innuendo.

Grantaire shrugs. “People will still suck, you’ll still win, you always do. You’re _Enjolras.”_

Grantaire’s trust in him, this pure veneration, has been bugging Enjolras somewhere in the back of his mind, but the irritation comes out full force now, and his hands shake as he attempts to keep it in check. They’re both tired—travel tournaments will do that to the hardiest of debaters—which only aggravates Enjolras’s headache.

“Don’t say that. You’re too smart to believe in my abilities so blindly.”

Grantaire smiles wryly. “Am I?”

Felix Tholomyès, a middle-aged judge Enjolras had ever liked due to his pompousness, spots the two from around a corner and smiles in a caricature of consolation. “I heard about your last around, Enjolras. She mutilated you.”

Mentioning that she had bought the win sounds petty, and anyway, Enjolras has no desire to prove himself to Tholomyès.

“You win some, you lose some,” he responds.

Tholomyès laughs. “Better luck next time, Blondie. And write better cases.”

Gritting his teeth, Enjolras says, “Will do.”

When Tholomyès leaves, Grantaire sighs, shifting the strap of his bag and rolling his shoulders. “Come on, it’s getting dark. Cosette just told me everyone’s waiting for us at this Thai place on Guadalupe. Marius is even done with his ‘we should have eaten at someplace cheaper’ speech, we won’t have to deal with that.”

Enjolras contemplates stewing in self-pity for a little while longer, but maybe what he needs to feel better about a botched round is food, so he agrees.

* * *

It only takes Enjolras five minutes to start ranting. “What I don’t understand is _why_. I hate to suspect one of us, but with the ease our cases seem to be released, it has to be someone on the inside. Or another school that’s being very, very sneaky about this.”

Another group of straggling debaters, making the same turn they are, stare at Enjolras when he starts yelling, but otherwise, the streets are nearly empty.

“Enjolras, you can’t get hung up on this.”

“A debate team is supposed to stick together. We’re not the kind of team that has two separate groups of friends, these people are the closest friends we have.”

Grantaire rolls his eyes. “Now is not the time for the ‘debate is life’ speech.”

On the contrary, Enjolras thinks. Every time is a great time for the “debate is life” speech.

“When you join a debate team, you’re signing away free weekends, devoting your time and attention to the betterment of said team. The synergistic interaction—“

Grantaire grabs his shoulder and spins him to face a school art project sitting in front of the library, something that looks like a metal ball of yarn. “Look, isn’t that pretty?”

“You’re trying to distract me.”

“Is it working?”

Too busy ignoring Grantaire, Enjolras doesn’t pay attention to the turn, nearly stumbling when his foot hits a bit of sidewalk raised higher than the rest. Suddenly, a thought occurs to him.

“What do you think about Montparnasse as a potential suspect? He has a motive. He’s never liked us very much, and he lacks morals. He’s probably sneaky enough to get into our stuff, make it look like one of us is a traitor.”

Grantaire rolls his eyes, as he is wont to do whenever Enjolras begins the anti-Montparnasse speech. Grantaire should be proud of him. In freshman year, the speech had been given at least once a week, but now, with mutual friends between the two, Enjolras somewhat tones down the distrust and the insistence that Montparnasse is involved in shady business.

And he is—Enjolras doesn’t dislike people arbitrarily. He talks to too many judges behind the scenes, convenes with too many people to discuss others’ cases, and befriends too many of Enjolras’s teammates.  

Grantaire has the _look_ on his face, that look that signals when he’s cooing at Enjolras’s adorableness inside his head. Look, Enjolras pretends he can’t notice a lot of things, but subtlety is not Grantaire’s forte.

“No, he doesn’t like _you_. And that’s more because your face turns this amusing shade of red when you’re mad than because he actually has anything against you.”

Well, that’s new.

“And don’t go off on how he stares at you funny. I used to stare at you funny too, every time you forget to button your shirt—actually, scratch that, I still stare at you funny—and I definitely don’t have a hidden agenda against Les Amis.”

Enjolras’s blood still boils with anger at the indignity of being defeated by dishonest means, and when he gets back, he and Combeferre are going to have a longwinded discussion on motives and means, but Grantaire looks ready to drop the conversation altogether. His feet drag across the concrete, and Enjolras notices the sketchbook he’d taken out of his backpack, probably what he’d been working on as he waited for Enjolras to finish his round.

“Have you thought about where you’re going next year?” The words are out of Enjolras’s mouth before he can stop them, and he flushes immediately.

They’re not that kind of couple, the kind that has intimate discussions on where they see themselves in five years. They’re not really _any_ kind of couple at all, which is a very hipster thing for Enjolras to think, but let’s face it, with his taste in music and skinny jeans, he’s halfway there.

Grantaire looks pained, playing with the sleeve of the suit jacket that hangs out of his backpack. “I’m not you. I don’t have some grand life plan mapped out for the next few years.”

Both Enjolras and Grantaire have so many debate scholarships by this point that money is hardly an issue, even with Grantaire’s abysmal grades. And Enjolras is no Combeferre, but he makes a pretty good name for himself at school. He’s going to do a law major in college, start a non-profit after, and revolutionize the nation. That’s only a short-term goal. Next up, the world.

He just wonders if that plan is going to include Grantaire in any way.

“Here’s what’s going to happen.” Grantaire kicks a rock that’s lying in their path. “I’m going to go to college, major in something respectable and professional that my father approves of, probably have a mental breakdown where I question my life choices because why would I want a nine to five job, and realize that I’m going to disappoint everyone.”

“If that were to happen,” Enjolras says carefully, “you wouldn’t disappoint me.”

Grantaire’s eyes widen, and Enjolras really has to fix that, fix how strange Enjolras’s few displays of affection still seem to Grantaire.

“And if you’re so sure that’s what’s going to happen, why listen to your father? You have so many other interests, why not pursue those?”

“My interests? They’re hobbies, nothing more.”

Enjolras makes a disapproving sound in his throat, but Grantaire pretends not to notice. The next few minutes are filled with silence as Grantaire works to avoid Enjolras’s questioning gaze.

Excluding the back pain from his heavy backpack that he’ll no doubt wake up with in the morning, the scene is highly reminiscent of Enjolras’s first failed attempt at a date with Grantaire.

Grantaire voices his own realization before he can. “You know what people recreate first dates for? Anniversaries.”

“Happy two weeks and six-sevenths, then,” Enjolras says dryly.

“Aw, you care enough for fractions.” Grantaire rifles through his backpack before throwing a squishy globe, complete with crudely outlined green continents, to Enjolras. It fits into his hand easily. “As an anniversary present, please accept by gift of a stress ball. You need it.”

Enjolras gives it a curious squeeze. It’s strangely relaxing. “Why do you even have one?”

“Daddy,” Grantaire spits out the word, “seems to think I have repressed issues.” Shaking his head, he brightens. “And look, now whenever your conquer-the-world tendencies take over, you can just remember you have the earth in the palm of your hand.”

Enjolras figures he should be offended—there’s a difference between taking over the world and ridding it of the useless politicians and bureaucrats who hinder a revolution of the oppressed—but Grantaire gives him the _look_ again, and he thinks the same expression may be gracing his own features.

They round the corner, and in front of him, Enjolras sees the metal ball of yarn again. Suspicious, he points out, “We’ve been walking around for a while. Are we going the right way? You have the map.”

Grantaire holds the creased map up to the light of the streetlamp, his mouth slightly agape as if this is the first time he’s noticed he’s holding a map at all. “I have the map,” he repeats, incredulous. “I _have_ the map. I have the _map_. _I_ have the—“

Enjolras stops dead, foot landing on a sidewalk crack. “Wait, don’t you know where we’re going? I thought you took all those turns because you’d been checking the map.”

“I thought _you_ knew where we were going.”

Enjolras pinches the bridge of his nose. “You mean you haven’t been looking at the map at all?”

“I was too busy trying to calm you down!”

“We’ve been walking around for an hour.”

Grantaire glances down at his watch. “You liar, it’s only been 53 minutes.”

Enjolras feels the weight of the laptop in his backpack, filled with new (now useless) cases. “We’re both tired, and I don’t want to get into a fight. Let’s just use the map from now on.”

Five minutes into their new plan of attack, they lose the map.

“Motherfu—“ Grantaire kicks a fire hydrant as he watches the map blowing in the strong wind before it finally lands behind a line of bushes with particularly spiky leaves. The wind had come out of nowhere, ruining their chances of eating dinner at a respectable time. It’s edging on 11:30.

“We could just ask people?” Grantaire proposes.

Ten minutes into _that_ , Enjolras has scared away two people wearing offensive t-shirts, interrupted a girl’s directions by asking her about an organization she volunteers for, and insulted someone’s (clearly inferior) hair. Grantaire nearly stamps his foot in frustration, but neither is particularly good at remembering verbal instructions anyway.

After circling Starbucks for the fifth time in an hour, Enjolras decides that he and Grantaire are probably lost.

“We probably should have used the map,” Grantaire admits, taking a break from biting his straw. Enjolras had been tempted, really truly tempted, to make fun of him for ordering a mocha frappucino in February, but they’re both so exhausted, weighed down by schoolbooks and laptop cases, that he can hardly move. They’ve both given up on looking professional, and Grantaire’s tie hangs around his neck untied. He’s unbuttoned the top few buttons of his shirt, baring the skin of his throat. Enjolras pretends not to stare.

“Your fault,” Enjolras says, more tired than angry. He reclines back in the chair, trying to cushion his sore back. The girl behind the counter had offered to give them directions, but well, _coffee_ , and Enjolras needs a few minutes to recuperate.

“Yeah, totally my fault that I get too caught up in your righteous anger to pay attention to a map. When you really think about it, this is all because of you and your stupid voice.”

Enjolras huffs. “It’s a nice voice.”

“Hence my problem with it.”

Sipping on his hot coffee, Enjolras is content, a strange mood for someone sore, hungry, and irritated by his boyfriend. “If I had to get lost with someone, at least it was with you.”

Grantaire groans from the other side of the couch. “That was a statement worthy of a kiss, O Fearless Leader, but I am far too tired to move, so we can pretend I’m over there right now sucking face with you.”

They wind up calling Courfeyrac, interrupting dinner and bringing on what Courfeyrac assures them is the wrath of his empty stomach. Courfeyrac is many things, but he knows how to read a map, and it only takes him five minutes to walk into Starbucks, dragging the two to a good dinner and only mildly decent company.

* * *

Finally shuffling into their hotel room, a go-to box of pad thai under Enjolras’s arm, they find one actual bed and one rollaway bed. When Enjolras and Grantaire both eye the real bed, Courfeyrac yells an emphatic “no” before claiming the bed himself.

There’s quite a bit of “you got the bed last time, you bastard” and “my hair can only be placed on decent pillows” before the late hour gets to them. Enjolras and Combeferre end up sharing the bed, but in the middle of the night, Grantaire wakes up to flip off Courfeyrac before softly padding his way to Enjolras. Combeferre, heavy sleeper that he is, doesn’t stir as Grantaire plops himself down in between the two, curling his arms around Enjolras.

“Wassgoinon?” Enjolras mumbles sleepily when he feels Grantaire’s hand under his shirt, not nearly awake enough to mind.

Grantaire doesn’t answer, instead opting to bury his nose into Enjolras’s curls, breathing in deeply.

When Courfeyrac wakes up in the morning, he finds Grantaire and Enjolras sprawled across each other, a still-snoring Combeferre on the floor next to them. His legs are tangled in the sheets he’d taken with him in the fall.  

Courfeyrac rolls his eyes as he wakes Combeferre up, and they’re downstairs to eat breakfast before Enjolras can wake up and realize his friends had witnessed him cuddling Grantaire.

* * *

When Enjolras had questioned Grantaire about his plan to seduce Enjolras, the blond had been sure it was over and done with now that Grantaire had achieved his goal.

From the way Grantaire is rubbing at the bulge in his pajama pants, however, only they’re about to enter phase two of the seduction scheme.

“What are you—“ He bucks his hips when Grantaire’s fingers trace the outline of his cock. Grantaire’s own Tweety Bird pajama pants hang low on his hips, and that’s not supposed to be sexy, not at all. They’re both shirtless already, the room too hot for clothes. Enjolras suspects Courfeyrac may have messed with the air conditioner before leaving.

“Combeferre and Courfeyrac are eating breakfast, and you know how Courfeyrac likes to savor his food. We have at least forty-five minutes.” Grantaire hand slips under the waistband of the pants, just for a moment, and Enjolras arches into the touch. Rolling over so Grantaire’s upper body is pinned under his weight, he leans down to kiss the other boy, bruising his lips the best he can.

“Assertive,” Grantaire says breathlessly, when Enjolras finally relinquishes his claim over that mouth. He winks. “I like that.” Then, grinning, he points out, “You know, you’re technically jailbait.”

There is not a bone in Grantaire’s body that cares, and Enjolras knows it.

Enjolras frowns because, see, just because he skipped a grade doesn’t mean he wants to be reminded about it constantly. “You irritate me.”

“If it gets me laid, I could irritate you a lot more.”

The grin is so sarcastic and typically sardonic that no one can really blame Enjolras for attacking Grantaire’s neck, teeth nipping the hollow of his throat. Enjolras has always been too busy for them to mess around often despite Grantaire’s offers to relieve the stress, but he’s still burning from yesterday’s humiliation, and he _wants._

Grantaire thoughts seem to be running along the same vein. “Look, yesterday was a bad day for you, but now that you’ve gotten over the shock of hitting one of your own cases at a national circuit tournament—“

Enjolras whines impatiently. Maybe his anger is now manifesting in lust, which is probably unhealthy, but Grantaire can make him stop thinking so hard. “Let’s not talk about yesterday.”

He noses at Grantaire’s warm hip, his lips brushing where skin meets pants. “You don’t have to,” Grantaire whispers, staring at Enjolras with such open adoration that Enjolras’s breath hitches.

Enjolras ignores him, which seems to be the best decision, because Grantaire threads his fingers through Enjolras’s hair, holding him close. He chuckles, “Are you going to take my clothes off soon? Or are you trying to see if you can take my pants off with your teeth?”

Enjolras winces. “Isn’t that supposed to be sexy?”

“What have you been learning from Courfeyrac,” Grantaire breathes, but his mouth snaps shut when Enjolras pulls off the pajamas and settles between his thighs. “Did he—“ Enjolras licks up his shaft experimentally. He doesn’t know what he’s doing at all, not really, but he’s counting on Grantaire being too aroused to judge Enjolras’s lack of finesse. From the way Grantaire is panting softly, Enjolras isn’t doing too badly. “Did he give you –“ Enjolras takes the head of Grantaire’s cock into his mouth “—like, tips, or something?”

Enjolras pauses to level a glare at Grantaire. “I don’t think Courfeyrac is an appropriate topic of discussion during a blowjob,” he says primly.

“Oh _God._ ” Grantaire’s hips stutter involuntarily, Enjolras can tell he’s been trying to keep as still as possible, and he tightens his fingers in Enjolras’s hair.

Enjolras begins stroking the base of his cock, whatever he can’t take into his mouth. He alternates between licking and sucking, probing Grantaire’s slit with his tongue. The sensation is strange, but he could probably get used to this, and he likes doing nice things for Grantaire.

Before long, Grantaire grips the sheets, white-knuckled. “I’m—“ Enjolras releases Grantaire’s erection from his mouth, and it only takes a few more strokes until Grantaire spills into his hand.

Grantaire’s eyes are still blown wide with lust, and he pulls Enjolras up, divesting him of his pants along the way. Already half-hard, it doesn’t take Enjolras long to come under the attention of Grantaire’s talented fingers.

Fifteen minutes later, Courfeyrac enters the room whistling, his stomach full of pancakes and happiness. Enjolras and Grantaire are already dressed, both studiously averting their eyes from the bed. Courfeyrac surveys the room with curious eyes. “Why did you two strip the sheets from the bed? Did someone spill something—oh fucking _hell.”_

* * *

Courfeyrac is used to being the center of attention, his personality practically calls for it. He is both obnoxiously loud-mouthed and incredibly kind, a combination that draws people to him like moths to a flame. Surrounded by a group of debaters taking videos on their cell phones, he now proves his ability to draw people in, doing backflips down the length of the wide hallway and nearly knocking over unsuspecting passerby.

Enjolras is sure the video will end up on Vine or YouTube sometime in the next hour—Courfeyrac is one of those people everyone watches in rounds, just to see what stunts he’ll pull. If people watch Enjolras to revel in others’ misery, they watch Courfeyrac for the opposite.

Combeferre, as he’s wont to do whenever Courfeyrac participates in such blatant “watch me” behavior, diligently ignores him by pretending to read his Physics textbook upside-down.

“He should be practicing.” Combeferre doodles in the margins of his notebook, pressing the pen into the paper harder than he probably has to. For someone who rarely even touches annoyance, he sounds like some Combeferrian version of pissed off, which, to anyone other than his close friends, would sound perfectly normal.

“He kind of…is,” Enjolras points out. He’s sure Courfeyrac has somehow managed to incorporate the possibility of breaking his body into one of his performances.

Enjolras is no love guru, but he _is_ a best friend, and he probably has a duty to ask Combeferre what’s wrong.

Biting his pen, a nervous habit of his, Combeferre asks, “Do you really think that someone who does backflips in a hallway is going to want to date someone who can’t keep up with him? He’s always the center of attention. I’m…not.”

From what Enjolras can tell, the answer is an adamant yes, but people who are not love gurus probably shouldn’t try to fix others’ relationship issues lest they make things worse.

“You should talk to him,” Enjolras advises, which, really, is very hypocritical of him.

Combeferre looks like he’s on the verge of testing out Newton’s Third Law of Motion by equally and oppositely reacting to Enjolras’s lack of tact, pointing out how he and Grantaire both stumbled onto the bus in a daze this morning, but Courfeyrac ends a flip by landing neatly in front of Combeferre.

“Hi,” he says, his hair wild and slightly out of breath.

Combeferre eyes him warily. “Hello.”

Cameras still trained on him, Courfeyrac leans down, his lips closer to Combeferre’s ear than strictly necessary, and whispers something. Combeferre’s eyes widen comically, and in a flash, his hands are gripping the back of Courfeyrac’s neck, pulling his lips down to meet Combeferre’s.

Enjolras wonders if he should remind them that there are people still recording—a guy looks like he’s on the verge of tears—but they look so content that, no, he has no right to ruin this.

He’s not that tactless.

“First you and R, now these two. These past few weeks have been like an extended Valentine’s Day for Les Amis, huh?” Montparnasse is leaning against a wall, just out of Enjolras’s direct line of vision, which is why he hadn’t noticed the other boy at first. With his arms crossed over his chest, he smirks at Enjolras.

“How do you even know about that?” Enjolras asks crossly.

“Grantaire has this certain…look on his face after he’s been fucked out. Lasts for hours sometimes.”

Enjolras knows—or he knows he should know—that Montparnasse is mentioning this only to rile him up. Montparnasse knows the facts. Enjolras is prone to bad argumentation and logical fallacies when he’s angry and distracted from his goal.

But it’s one thing to suspect that Montparnasse and Grantaire had been _Montparnasse and Grantaire_ at one point and another thing to hear it straight from one-half of the horse’s mouth, so to speak. Because it’s Montparnasse, Enjolras bets he’s the tail end.

He hadn’t planned on bringing this up, and some part of him realizes the ramifications, but he honestly does not care, he wants answers that badly.

“Are you stealing our cases?”

Montparnasse actually has the gall to laugh. “Do you really think I need them to beat you?”

Yes, Enjolras thinks, but that’s judgmental, and he swears he’s been trying to accept people more readily.

Montparnasse’s stance is nonchalant, but he knows more than he should. Hell, Enjolras has been friends with Courfeyrac all his life—he knows when people are trying to hide something. Grantaire may have told him not to worry about it, but Grantaire was also the one who told him he’d always turn in his cases on time, and look how that turned out.

“But congratulations on finally realizing he’s good enough for you.”

Still watching Combeferre and Courfeyrac from the corner of his eye, Enjolras replies, “He’s always been.”

“Really, is that why he used to come to me every time you told him off for not caring enough?”

Grantaire comes back with kolaches a few minutes later, but by then, Montparnasse has gone off to check postings.

“Hey, look,” Grantaire waves his phone in Enjolras’s face, “our next round is in the same building. We can walk there together.”

Enjolras nods, numbly, because he can feel everyone’s eyes staring at him, every other school wondering how he managed to be defeated so soundly at an event he’s always dominated in. The bliss from this morning has worn off with every stare he’s gotten, and he should be investing his anger in figuring out the mystery, not wasting his time on other pursuits. Grantaire pretends not to notice.

The streets had seemed almost otherworldly at night, especially with Grantaire by his side, but when he walks the same ones now, he can’t help but think they look different in the sunlight.


	4. drop your briefs, baby

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bad things happen.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I usually get someone to read over my writing to check for grammar errors, but it's almost two in the morning, and none of my friends are online, so I had to rely on my own editing abilities for this, which are spotty at best. 
> 
> Chapter title comes from the briefs you get in Student Congress, which is the event where you sit silently for three hours or something. Briefs are the list of laws (and information about them) that the Congress has the possibility of debating that session.

“Babykins, this is the fifth time this week I’ve found you like this. It’s two in the morning.” Grantaire pulls Enjolras into a sitting position, and Enjolras has to blink a few times to shake away the exhaustion slowing his movements. He rubs at his eyes, and suddenly, Grantaire is standing in front of him in perfect clarity, camera slung around his neck.

“Did I fall asleep in here again?” The classroom they use for debate practices is empty save for Enjolras and Grantaire, and the bright light of the room, a stark contrast to the darkness of the rest of the school building, makes the entire experience feel like something out of a bad horror movie. Revenge of the Surprisingly Intelligent Debate Case Thief, starring Enjolras, Who Never Gets Enough Sleep.

Courfeyrac _did_ once say Enjolras is terrifying when he doesn’t get his beauty sleep.

Something dawns on him. “Did you just call me babykins?”

Grantaire shrugs. “I’m trying out endearments until they stick. Guess I’ll have to cross that one off the list?”

“How about you call me by my name?”

Slinging an arm around his shoulders, Grantaire asks, “But where’s the fun in that?”

As Enjolras scowls, Grantaire fingers the camera, deftly turning it on and removing the lens cap with one hand. He’s had so much practice with this that before Enjolras can react, Grantaire has snapped a picture of him in his pajamas—he knew he’d probably have to sneak out of school at some ungodly hour of the morning—with his hair mussed and his eyes bloodshot.

“Is now really a good time to do your job as team historian?” Enjolras runs his fingers through his hair as a makeshift comb, but his unruly curls refused to be ruled by his hand. Theoretically, he should rejoice in the rebellion that consumes every inch of his body, but he never meant it quite so literally.  

Grantaire snaps another picture, darting out of Enjolras’s way when he reaches out to snatch the camera. “You’re always saying I should participate more. And what better way to capture team spirit than taking pictures of the team captain tirelessly working his way through the night?”

 _Click_ , the camera goes.

“Better catch me,” Grantaire goes.

“Shit,” Enjolras goes.

He chases Grantaire around the perimeter of the room, the other boy occasionally spinning around to catch Enjolras in varying stages of anger and amusement. He doesn’t have time to frame the shots as meticulously as Enjolras knows he prefers, but he seems to be having way too much fun for two o’clock in the morning.

Courfeyrac was right. Enjolras needs to work out more. Grantaire, athletic as he is, leaves him in the dust. Every time he makes a grab for the other boy, Grantaire crouches behind a desk to knock it over into Enjolras’s path. He leaps across tabletops in a kind of dance, and Enjolras is too busy watching the muscles of his legs work underneath his tight jeans to engage in the chase for a whole two minutes.

Enjolras is panting when he finally manages to corner Grantaire—he strongly suspects Grantaire had allowed him to do so. He doubles over gasping, hands on his knees. “Grantaire, I look like absolute shit. No one wants a montage of me in my pajamas playing at the end-of-year banquet.”

“Probably better than all the pictures I have of you sleeping.”

“Um.”

Grantaire coughs. “That, uh, actually sounded a lot creepier than it is. You just fall asleep at debate tournaments. A lot. And I just happen to take pictures of you. A lot.”

“Why—“

Grantaire pushes on, nervously. “If it helps, I take pictures of everyone else sleeping too, but you’re the most adorable. You make these really cute noises…” Grantaire leaves the sentence hanging when he sees Enjolras’s stricken expression.

“You’re ridiculous,” is all Enjolras can manage.

“Ridiculous good or ridiculous bad? Because, yeah, I already had a pretty good idea of my ridiculousness, but some people find it endearing, and I’m hoping you’re one of them. It would be really great, actually, if you were, but I don’t know why you’d be dating me if you didn’t like it since I’m pretty damn sure the picture thing is only the tip of this ridiculous iceberg.”

Instead of answering, Enjolras laces his fingers with Grantaire’s and pulls the other boy to him, fitting their mouths together. It starts out soft, but like any kiss between the two, it turns into gasping and tongues almost immediately.

“Sometimes, I want to punch you,” Enjolras says solemnly.

“That’s great! Sometimes I want to punch me too.” Before Enjolras can decide whether Grantaire was serious, Grantaire ruffles Enjolras’s hair and plants a chaste kiss on his forehead. “I just need to talk to you for a bit. Then you can get back to work.”

The urge to keep kissing Grantaire disappears abruptly. He eyes the table where he had been working, covered with notebooks and philosophy books. His laptop plays his screensaver, a string of debate team pictures Courfeyrac must have uploaded onto his computer when he hadn’t noticed. With every blink of his eyes, another piece of the illusion shatters until he comes crashing back into reality.  

Grantaire tries not to acknowledge the change, but something in him must be telling him to back away slowly, to steadily make his way to the door.

“You know what? I’ll talk to you later. I’ll leave you then.” Grantaire refuses to make eye contact with him.

Enjolras barely notices, eyes already glazed over. “See you tomorrow.”

If it starts with the glasses, then it ends with the impromptu photoshoot, but Enjolras doesn’t know that yet. All he has to go by is a sinking feeling in his gut that hits him hard when he finally manages to realize Grantaire had broken into school at two o’clock in the morning just to see him.

* * *

The underlying problem with Montparnasse is that he doesn’t do anything but flirt with his opponents and extract information from his judges, two activities that may seem normal at a debate tournament, but Enjolras has no other leads, so he’s going to stalk the shit out of him.

It seemed like a good idea when he’d run it by Combeferre that Friday.

“This is probably one of your worst ideas yet, and you were the one who told Joly he should look up Derrida. You know what happens when he finds philosophy that involves cats.”

Combeferre looked down at Enjolras from where he stood on the chair, methodically placing file bins onto the wooden shelves. The look was stern, Combeferre’s typical expression whenever Enjolras proposed something particularly ridiculous.

“It’s not my fault Joly feels a deep, personal connection to any philosophy that talks about cats staring at naked people.”

Combeferre wiped his glasses on his shirt tiredly. “We have one tournament left. After that, we’re completely out of money. You should be spending this time making sure you win, get Lamarque to look over your cases for you and share them with everyone else to check. Do whatever you can to shore up your arguments, not trying to sneak around.”

Enjolras’s mouth twisted into something like a pout, but Enjolras never pouted, so he’d deny it until the end of time. “You don’t think I can sneak?”

“Do you know the meaning of staying quiet?”

But Enjolras had ignored him; he’s gotten very good at ignoring sound warnings in recent weeks.

Enjolras hadn’t anticipated suppressing his natural desire to solve problems by speaking out would prove so difficult, running around and trying to keep out of Montparnasse’s line of sight.

Montparnasse leads a more boring tournament life than Enjolras had previously thought. Instead of back-alley drug dealings, Montparnasse eats McDonald’s with the rest of his team. Instead of offering judges money to vote for him in rounds, he asks Marius for help with his Calculus homework.

Enjolras is just about to give up when Jehan, Claquesous, and Grantaire join Montparnasse on the fire escape he’s currently perched on, without caring one bit about the possibility of their combined weight collapsing the rusty metal.

With a start, Enjolras realizes that it’s the first time he’s seen Grantaire all tournament. Grantaire is only judging at this one, but Enjolras still should have seen him between rounds. True, Enjolras always manages to find a dark corner to work, a place to avoid his teammates, but Grantaire always finds him—that’s just how they work. Enjolras leaves, and Grantaire pursues.

Their communication has been spotty at best the past week, and in the back of Enjolras’s mind, he swears that he had meant to call Grantaire. He’d just gotten caught up by work and stress.

The meeting reeks of suspicion, not just because of its participants. Claquesous and Montparnasse steal furtive glasses at their surroundings every few seconds, and Grantaire twists his hands nervously. Only Jehan seems unaffected by the tension in the encounter, sitting near the very edge of the fragile hunk of metal, smiling as the sun and wind hit his face.

Finally, Montparnasse, Jehan, and Grantaire leave, Montparnasse and Grantaire heading off in a different direction. Enjolras’s heart does not stop thudding until they walk past his hiding spot without noticing.

Jehan is still standing in front of the door, pulling a notebook out of his bag, when Enjolras ducks his head out from behind the pillar. “Psst, Jehan.”

Jehan jumps. “Whoa,” he says, taking in Enjolras’s unkempt hair and missing blazer. “Aren’t you supposed to be eating lunch? And where are your shoes?”

“Never mind that. What were you talking to Montparnasse and Claquesous about? Did you find out anything important?”

Jehan carefully places his notebook back into his bag and squares his shoulders. “Eponine warned me you would try something like this.”

“I had to do something.”

Jehan fixes Enjolras with a piercing gaze, and suddenly, Enjolras remembers why some people are afraid of Jean Prouvaire. “Montparnasse didn’t do anything. He’s not close enough to any of us to get anyone to share information with him.”

“He walked away with Grantaire, how do you explain that if he’s not trying to worm his way onto our good side?”

The words are out of his mouth before he realizes what he’s just suggested about _Grantaire_ of all people. When the half-accusation rings in his ears, he wishes the words that he spits out could be connected to him by metaphorical rope, so he can pull them back and keep his subconscious suspicions under wraps.

Jehan’s eyes narrow. “You think…he’s still flirting with Grantaire. For team secrets,” he says flatly.

“Well, isn’t he?”

Jehan turns to leave, and for the first time, Enjolras notices the black rose, the one Montparnasse usually keeps between his teeth, twined through the locks of hair on the right side of Jehan’s head. “You really are oblivious.”

* * *

Ever since their dramatic rom-rom makeout, Courfeyrac and Combeferre have been inseparable, and the looks they pass to each other when they think no one is watching rival those of Marius and Cosette’s. At least Marius had been ecstatic to find Courfeyrac could no longer tease him about his romantic endeavors. When he’d tried pulling the same thing on Courfeyrac, it had only taken one lewd suggestion of what Courfeyrac and Combeferre do when left alone for Marius to scurry off, blushing.

Enjolras, as the best friend, has an obligation to be happy for both of them, but when Courfeyrac kicks him under the table for the tenth time in as many minutes, he decides he’s had enough.

“Will you two stop playing footsie and listen to my rant?”

Courfeyrac tears his eyes away from gazing deeply into Combeferre’s soul or whatever it is he’s doing, and searches the room. “Where’s Grantaire? We need to shove you off on him.”

At the mention of the other boy, Enjolras blushes red, remembering what he’d thought about his boyfriend, no matter how implied the accusation may be. Grantaire would never betray Les Amis, none of them would, and Jehan is a wonderful person with a horrible taste in men.

“He’s with Montparnasse,” Enjolras replies tonelessly.

Courfeyrac pats his arm. “What you’re feeling, my friend, is jealousy.”

Combeferre, ever the pragmatist, joins in. “Did Lamarque show Grantaire your case yet? You’re going to need his help.”

Enjolras hisses out a breath between locked teeth. He hardly ever asks Grantaire for help at tournaments—a combination of pride and the desire to last an entire tournament without wanting to duct tape the other boy’s mouth closed—but Grantaire knows people, they’re almost as attracted to him as they are to Courfeyrac. Despite his cynicism and sarcasm, he’s good company, especially he’s had a few beers. Grantaire is simply the best option when it comes to scoping out his possible opponents’ cases and creating strategies to defeat them.

And if he’s honest to himself, the residual guilt from his traitorous thoughts is what spurs him to text Grantaire.

 **Enjolras (Set at 3:05 PM):** Hey, when you get tired of judging novices with bad arguments, get over here, okay? I need you to help me prep.

 **Grantaire (Sent at 3:06 PM):** are you for srs asking for my help???

 **Enjolras (Sent at 3:06 PM):** Yes.

 **Grantaire (Sent at 3:08 PM):** honey im dying in this round right now the kid buttoned the bottom button of his blazer

no but srs i’m offended

novices man novices

why would you do that to yourself whyyy

oh shit i’m criticizing peoples fashion choices i’m slowly turning into courfeyrac aren’t i

save meee bby

* * *

It turns out Enjolras is the one who needs saving. 

He most certainly has the earth in the palm of his hand, and he’s currently squeezing it, otherwise frozen in his chair as he waits for everyone to leave the room before he does. Not even taking anger out on a plushy ball seems to be helping, and he’s caught between wanting to make someone cry and wanting to be left alone to wallow. The former is winning out. His blood buzzes in his veins, and he _burns_.

His movements erratic, he slides his pens into his backpack without organizing them into their proper slots like he usually does. One red sparkly pen, given to him to Grantaire, glitters in the midst of the generic black and blue. Before he can reach out a hand to catch it, it slides off the table and rolls underneath a desk. Enjolras makes no effort to retrieve it.

His laptop is halfway into its case when Grantaire runs in, only slightly out of breath.

“Shit, I’m so sorry I wasn’t there. I know I promised, but I got caught up with something. I’m sure you won—right? You always win, you’re Enjolras,” he says desperately. Enjolras doesn’t reply—Grantaire should know by now. Audiences walking out of rounds can never keep quiet.

Grantaire hurries over to help, but Enjolras bats his hands away. They’re covered in pen marks, and on the back of his right hand is a hastily-drawn doodle of Enjolras wearing a cape, holding a sword in his hand and yelling for revolution. Maybe if Enjolras looks away, he can ignore it.

Enjolras takes his time zipping up his backpack. “Where have you been?”

“With Montparnasse, I had to talk to him about something—“

“Of course you were.”

Grantaire’s face shifts from worry to defiance. “What’s the big deal anyway? You’ve never needed my help before.”

“I was one point away from qualling,” Enjolras says through gritted teeth.

Grantaire stops dead, realization dawning in his eyes. He reaches out for Enjolras—their entire team is too tactile for their own good—but Enjolras flinches back. Grantaire keeps his arms determinedly glued to his sides after that.

“I’m so sorry, if I’d known, I would have helped.” Enjolras turns away, but Grantaire blocks his path.  “I’m fucking _sorry_ , okay? Look, even if I had been here, I wouldn’t have made a difference.”

“Did it occur to you that I may just have needed the moral support?”

Grantaire blinks as if presented with a concept he just can’t wrap his head around. Enjolras is so very tired of Grantaire placing him on a pedestal. This isn’t about the lack of help, or even about Montparnasse, really. This is about mutual need or perceived one-sided need or something he can’t quite put his finger on, augmented by disappointment and end-of-round tension.

Grantaire’s voice is soft but sure. “Didn’t seem like you needed the moral support this week when you ignored me in favor of late nights and last-minute cases. And okay, I’m good with that, I usually am. I can’t make you suddenly stop being you. But I could have used the moral support this week too, did you know that?”

Enjolras’s mouth opens and closes with unspoken words, he doesn’t know what he’s about to say, but Grantaire ignores him. “Did you really think I wasted precious sleeping time just to take pictures of you? I can take them whenever. That night was the only time I could get you to talk to me, and you blew me off then too.”

Enjolras pinches the bridge of his nose. Maybe he should rethink having this conversation when his mind is clear, when he’s had time to recollect his thoughts about this tournament and isn’t ready to lash out at everyone. But, see, every part of Enjolras has to be a rebel, and his mouth is no exception.

Every cell of his body tells him that this is a bad idea, but, “What were you doing with Montparnasse anyway, with anyone from another team when we’re at the last tournament of the year? If I didn’t know better—“

“Fuck you,” Grantaire spits.

“Can I depend on you for anything?”

Enjolras knows immediately that this is the wrong thing to say, and his mind flashes back to a dark hallway and a confession about a dead sister and a kid who didn’t know better. Grantaire reels back, nearly tripping over a desk in his haste to leave. The apology is right on the tip of Enjolras’s tongue, ready to be said.

But he waits a second too long, and Grantaire is gone.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh my god I'm more than halfway done with this story. I may actually finish a multichapter fic for once. It's two more chapters and then an epilogue. :D
> 
> yes there will be answers next chapter.


	5. every debater's throat needs strength and stamina

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title of the chapter is pretty much self-explanatory. I go through so many water bottles per tournament, and I used to pay for all of them before I remembered I could just bring my own water bottles. 
> 
> Beta'd by the [wonderfullest person in the world](http://slayerofhumanity.tumblr.com/).
> 
> I'm so sorry for the wait. Next one should come out sooner because it's happy, and I like writing happy things.

The reason why no one ever knows debaters throw great parties is that they most certainly do not.

At first glance, they seem to come with built-in icebreakers and speaking skills, well-equipped to charm the pants off anyone they wish. A curious “why are you wearing a suit?” or a “do you look that stuck-up all the time, or is that just your face?” go a long way toward starting legitimate conversations. Add in the ability to choose attention-grabbing words, and theoretically, the ingredients for acceptable social interaction are all there.

The problem, many claim, is that they simply prefer to spend time with their own brethren, opting for intellectual debates on the meaning of life over inane small talk with near-strangers.

Enjolras thinks that debaters are just really fucking weird, and no one else will put up with them, but he’ll let Courfeyrac lie to himself if it helps him sleep at night.

Even at debate-exclusive, in-school events, normalcy eludes them like a distant dream, and no one embraces this more than Courfeyrac.

“Fuck you, Eponine. You can’t beat me.” Courfeyrac stands atop a table near the rear window of the room, arms crossed over his chest and legs shoulder-width apart in a fighting stance. He wields a paper sword in his right hand and an Econ textbook shield in the other. Eponine mirrors his stance, holding the same weapons.

She steals periodic glances at her watch. “If I recall correctly, Grantaire had you beat in five minutes last year.”

“But Grantaire fences. Unfair advantage!”

The boy in question sits near the back of the room, decidedly disinterested in his supposed easy wins. His fingers move in stilted motions as he plays on his phone, and he seems seconds away from bolting, with only Jehan’s hand on his knee preventing him from doing so.

Maybe Courfeyrac’s claims about Enjolras’s emotional blindness weren’t too far off the mark after all. Enjolras is a blind man under no delusions that his other senses have been heightened from the loss of this one. He’s proud, and too easily angered, and a million other faults that keep obscuring his vision.

He has ten unsent texts and twenty unsent emails saved, but he’s far too proud to send straight-up groveling and far too sorry to send angry rants. A comfortable combination evades him, no matter how many words run through his head or how many times he bangs his at laptop keys hoping a fix will naturally come to him.

Grantaire’s eyes flicker upwards, just for a minute, and because fate seems to have some sort of vendetta against Enjolras, Grantaire is the only one to notice him standing in the hallway. He’s been stuck there, foot placed on the threshold, ever since Courfeyrac had convinced Eponine to join him in his crusade to make a fool of himself in front of his closest friends.

Enjolras usually ends the year with a customary inspirational speech. Wish every luck at state and nats, reminisce about shared memories, warn Courfeyrac not to try the karaoke thing, which he always ignores. He’d texted Combeferre that he’d opted for a reread of War and Peace instead but had found his feet taking him to Lamarque’s classroom anyway.

It seems wrong to give speeches when his friends will be off to state in two weeks, leaving Enjolras behind to stew in his own misery. He’ll be at home on his computer, tracking their progress online and hating every minute of it.

Enjolras’s heart beats fast, racing against every sense of self-preservation he has. Grantaire’s eyes are carefully blank now, and Enjolras is almost relieved when he breaks away to fix his attention back on the stage.

Lamarque has shoved the desks in the classroom to the sides to make a sort of dance floor, but this is just his traditional end-of-year hope that Courfeyrac and Grantaire will hold their traditional end-of-year grappling session in the cleared space instead of taking it out into the hallway, consequently forcing his colleagues to seriously reconsider why many had advocated for bigger academic activity budgets.

The collection of desks makes for a surprisingly functional stage. The edges don’t quite fit together, leaving gaping holes between desks, but the threat of falling or tripping only heightens the excitement.

Courfeyrac and Eponine circle each other hesitantly, taking slow, measured steps, their eyes never leaving the others’. Courfeyrac sticks the tip of his tongue out of the side of his mouth in concentration.

“You can talk the talk, but can you walk the walk?” Courfeyrac taunts.

“This is coming from the kid who refuses to watch Bambi because Bambi’s mom dies?” Eponine bites back.

“I was eight!”

“Then what was with the ugly sobbing at movie night?” Eponine has her back facing open air now, only a foot away from the ledge. One wrong step, and she would topple over.

“Are you two going to do anything? Because last year, Courfeyrac nearly got brained by a flying desk, and you have to beat that,” Feuilly whines. “It’s our senior year.”

“Patience, young grasshopper. Learn—“

Hoping to catch Eponine off guard, Courfeyrac lets out a raging battle cry and leaps on her now, brandishing his sword. If anyone can make the concept of a paper sword even more ridiculous than it sounds, it’s Courfeyrac. The tip of the sword barely brushes her debate team shirt before she dodges his attack, jumping about two feet to the right.

Courfeyrac takes another swing at her, and it goes wide. This time, his mistake costs him. Eponine ducks under his swing, grabbing his arm and twisting it behind his back. She keeps it pinned against his body as he struggles, trying to throw her off.

“I hate you, Eponine,” he wheezes, his face reddening. 

Eponine brightens. “I love you too.”

She throws her shoulder against his back and kicks at the back of his legs with her boot. Screaming, Courfeyrac goes toppling over the makeshift stage and lands in a heap, narrowly missing Feuilly by an inch. 

“You couldn’t have held out for another five minutes? You lost me twenty bucks.”

Cosette sashays over and plucks the money from Feuilly’s pocket. How Cosette knows where Feuilly keeps his money, Enjolras will never know, but Cosette has always been a girl of hidden talents.

“This is why you never bet against me. Or underestimate Eponine.” Opening her arms wide, she beckons to the rest of the team. “Alright, pay up.”

There is a collective groan.

“Oh, come on. At least none of you were stupid enough to think Courfeyrac would win.” She shrugs. “You just overestimated Courfeyrac’s endurance skills.”

Courfeyrac eyes spin around the room wildly. “Really? No one?  Combeferre, aren’t you morally obligated to bet on me?”

“You tried to climb up my rose trellis on Friday,” he says  blandly, “I doubted your judgment. And your balance.”

If this is how normal couples act, Enjolras is almost glad he and Grantaire were fucked up.

Eponine hops off the table and, in the process, stumbles over a stack of binders, which go spilling onto the floor. Marius makes a strangled noise and moves to retrieve them, but Cosette shoves a chocolate-chip cookie into his mouth and rubs his arm comfortingly, telling him to enjoy the party while it lasts.

Eponine, for her part, barely notices. She places a boot on Courfeyrac’s chest and presses not-too-gently to keep him still.

“Kinky.” Courfeyrac winks lecherously.

She leans in close to his ear, hair draping over his face in the perfect picture of seduction. “Easy there, tiger. We wouldn’t want your boyfriend to get the wrong idea about our relationship now, would we?”

Combeferre replies easily, “Oh, Courfeyrac can take it.” A smirk plays at the corner of his lips, but his face otherwise remains straight.  

Before Enjolras can decide between gagging or gagging even more violently, Jehan spots him from across the room. “Enjolras? What are you doing here?”

Grantaire moves to shush him, but the damage has already been done, and the attention’s on him now.

Enjolras’s stomach churns, and the chocolate cake he’d indulged in earlier threatens to make a return trip through his digestive system. Grantaire looks like a deer caught in the headlights—a very _not adorable_ deer, he reminds himself—and his ability to speak seems to have left him.

“Hi,” Enjolras says. The greeting is aimed at the assembled group, but Enjolras locks eyes with only Grantaire.

In tense situations, Grantaire is prone to snark and jokes, so it’s no surprise that he smirks when he replies, “I think the accepted social convention after breakups is a mutual agreement to avoid your ex.”

“Are we really going to do this now?”

“I thought you weren’t coming.”

Enjolras mouth twists into a scowl, but his heart isn’t in it. “You don’t have a monopoly on crappy debate parties.”

Courfeyrac, still pinned down by Eponine’s boot, resents that, and he makes it clear by his whining before Eponine places her foot over his mouth to shut him up.

“I’m sorry,” Enjolras tries, but Grantaire shakes his head.

“You shouldn’t be. You were right,” he says, and he shoulders past Enjolras, careful not to touch him along the way. His voice is so flippant that Enjolras longs to grab him, shake some sense into him, tell him that Enjolras was wrong and _why can’t he see that._

He is brilliant and masterful and just as blind as Enjolras.

The party, though it had never hit its stride, stops abruptly when Grantaire crosses that doorway, and a heavy silence hangs in the air.

Courfeyrac whistles. “That escalated quickly.”

The sound of rustling papers breaks the silence. Enjolras has never understood Marius’s compulsive need to avoid awkward situations by distracting himself, but he’s grateful for it now. He’s over there in seconds, sorting through the mess with his friend.  

Enjolras’s eyes narrow when he catches sight of a crumpled piece of notebook paper that had flown out of Marius’s binder in the fall. He picks it up with shaking hands. “Marius, What’s this?”

“Oh, that’s just my list of passwords,” Marius explains. Reaching over, he snatches it back and smiles fondly. “It’s saved my butt so many times.”

Yes, Enjolras has always wondered how hard it must be to memorize a computer username and password when both are “Cosette.”

His eyes don’t quite focus, and the words swim in front of Enjolras’s eyes. Colons jump out of the page, a long string of numbers and letters following in their wake. Or maybe his eyes don’t want to focus, sensing something horrible waiting for him. He squints, trying to discern the words, but the block in his mind refuses to translate the nonsense into meaning.

“What’s at the bottom?” Enjolras has already begun pacing, short walks back and forth in the little nook in the corner of the room.

Marius tilts his head in confusion. “That’s just the username and password to the Dropbox. Oh, it looks like someone changed them both to a long string of sixty-nines.”

“The _Dropbox_ ,” Enjolras realizes breathlessly. “Shit.”

Marius, for all of his faults, is no fool. He comes to the same conclusion Enjolras does, and he scrambles toward a computer, fingers rapidly clacking on the keys.

Enjolras is still staring at the paper, gaping in a very dignified manner, when Eponine’s voice slices through the haze in his mind and jars him back to reality.

“Lamarque cleared out his files already? But we still have state. And nats!”

Enjolras whips around to bear down on Eponine. His anger isn’t directed at her, but the aimless feeling struggles to get itself off his chest, and Eponine has set herself up as the most convenient victim. “What did you just say?”

Experienced third parties usually suggest backing down when Enjolras is like this, maybe compliment his hair a little to mollify him. But Eponine is a Thenardier, and Thenardiers are used to fucking people over, so she stands her ground. “I said that he cleared out his files.”

Enjolras shoves a frustrated hand through his hair. “And where did he clear them from?”

“The Dropbox,” she offers, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “The one none of us ever use but Lamarque insists on keeping anyway?”

The fact of the matter is, Enjolras loves change, he does. He challenges traditional modes of debate, and he lives for controversy. At heart, though, he loves the essence of this lifestyle, but with the good traditions come the bad, including traditional ways of cheating.

He’d assumed that it had been the usual surreptitious back-and-forth trading of flash drives, but something this mundane, he had never expected. This lacked finesse, based more on pure luck than anything else.

Enjolras can tell when the epiphany hits Combeferre, because of course it hits him first. His hand jerks toward his laptop involuntarily, but he pulls it back. “I had considered that the information could have been given through our shared files,” he starts, “But we email so often that I thought the Dropbox had fallen out of use.”

“Lamarque posted all of our files on there, for quick access in rounds.”

“You have got to be _shitting_ me.” Courfeyrac kicks a trash can, knocking it over. The little balls of paper they’d thrown in during the game of trashcan basketball spread out on the floor like ticking time bombs. “We’ve been so focused on physical sharing that we didn’t even—but,” he grasps at straws, “No one has the password, right? Just us?”

Marius winces from his spot on the computer, where he’s pulled up the website. Sure enough, the files all line up in a neat column, ready for the picking. “Well, no.”

“Marius…”

“When I tutor people, I give them my class notes, and all my passwords were in one of my binders.” He’s apologetic, glancing at Jehan out of the corner of his eye, when he says his next words. “The one I usually give out to Claquesous. Montparnasse probably helped. You know how close their team is.”

Jehan’s face falls, but his fingers are already grabbing at his phone, sending out frantic texts. Enjolras can’t let himself dwell on that now, but he’d almost wanted to be wrong, just for Jehan’s sake.

All eyes fixate on Marius, but he holds his hands up in defeat. “The thing is, I wrote my other passwords, but I didn’t even know the password until now. It’s written in a different handwriting, see, and I don’t know who—“

“Um,” Enjolras’s voice is soft now, a far cry from his usual commanding presence, “That would be me.”

And all hell breaks loose.

* * *

Once in a while, people forget that Enjolras is a cat secretly disguised in a seventeen-year-old boy’s body.

Something about warmth draws him in, offering a chance of respite for his overworked brain and slowing down the self-doubts he swears he hasn’t quite learned to dismiss. He’s a sucker for sunlight bathing his skin, enveloping him in rainbows and sweetness, so he braves dusty tile floors and playful taunts from his friends at debate tournaments, just to indulge himself in this.

Overlarge windows, stretching nearly floor to ceiling, line the main hallway of his school. That’s where he finds himself now, stretched out on a windowsill and acutely aware that someone’s butt may easily have easily occupied the spot he has pressed his face against.

It takes exactly fifteen minutes for Combeferre and Courfeyrac to find him, and when they do, he hardly has to turn his head to know they wear matching looks of concern. “You two are late.”

“Excuse us if us mere mortals can’t follow your schedule right on the dot,” Courfeyrac says.

Enjolras cracks a small smile. Combeferre’s hands wrap around his waist, and he’s propping the blonde up against his side, keeping him there with a soft press of the heel of his palm. Courfeyrac lands on Enjolras’s other side, sandwiching Enjolras between his two best friends.

They’ve gotten into only halfway-joking fights over favoritism before, so Enjolras chooses to hang his head instead of burying it into either of their shoulders. “I fucked up.”

Combeferre pats his back. “You couldn’t have known that helping Marius remember passwords would result in this.”

“You know, if Grantaire were here, I’m pretty sure he would appreciate the irony,” Courfeyrac comments. He clears his throat when Enjolras glares. “Okay, shutting up now.”

“Speaking of which, why isn’t he here now?”

As the saying goes, too many cooks spoil the broth. Or, in this case, too many debaters spoil the hypothetical broth of friendship by sticking their noses into places they have no business sticking their noses into.

Courfeyrac has always believed himself some sort of relationship guru—the center who keeps all of his friend’s lives running smoothly, bless their communication-challenged hearts—but Combeferre would never rub anything into Enjolras’s face. In spite of this, suddenly, it’s very easy to imagine a relationship as comfortable as theirs, something unmarked by potholes in the road that keep them from being on the same page, working in tandem.

But he doesn’t want easy and simple; he wants Grantaire.

“We broke up. I think. Well, anyway, I’m pretty sure the breakup goes unspoken when I accuse him of betraying all of his friends and reinforce the self-hatred he’s been feeling ever since his sister died,” Enjolras reminds him, in the coldest voice he has, but Courfeyrac still refuses to drop the subject.

“I expect it’s for something completely stupid. Look, you may not realize it even on your most introspective of days, but you like him. You need him now, and you depend on him—“

There it is, isn’t it? What he and Grantaire have been dancing around for days. They need each other in a way that can come crashing down all around them one day—has crashed all around them—and it’s the most beautiful thing Enjolras has ever held witness to.  

“You know, there is a bright side to this,” Courfeyrac ventures. “We know how to get revenge on them now.” He twiddles his fingers. “I’ve never been so glad to have a semi-active hacker as one of my friends. I love Eponine.”

Enjolras’s eyes open wide. “Are you going to delete their cases?” he asks gleefully.

“Oh, honey, it’s a good thing you’re in love with an artist—his imagination compensates for your lack thereof.”

Combeferre’s steadiness grounds Enjolras, always has. “Are you ready to rejoin the land of the living?”

“Let me sleep here, until I die here.”

Courfeyrac snorts. “Stop being so dramatic,” he says, and it’s almost the biggest piece of bullshit Enjolras has had to put up with today.

“Says the guy who tried to climb up a rose trellis.”

“Shut up, it was romantic.”

Enjolras does not rejoin his friends, but Courfeyrac and Combeferre don’t leave him to rot either. They stay like that, pressed against each other in the dying sunlight. Courfeyrac and Combeferre somehow get into complaining about Moffat, and the cadence of their discussion lulls him into a state close to peace—the closest he’ll get to peace today—and Courfeyrac doesn’t even complain that Enjolras nods off against Combeferre’s shoulder. Thank God for small miracles.

When Enjolras gets home, his inbox is filled with messages of consolation, but Grantaire’s obligatory text feels impersonal and _wrong_ , so he goes to bed without reading the others.

* * *

AP Physics, or as Courfeyrac dubs it, “physucs,” had always held a special place in Enjolras’s heart, the same place occupied by politicians and bad tournament food. He’d signed up for the class at Combeferre’s behest and had regretted the decision ever since.

On the bright side, at least he hadn’t chosen to take Chemistry instead, a decision that would force him into direct confrontation with Courfeyrac’s love of spitballs.

His brain is still fried from a longwinded discussion on Gauss’s Law when Enjolras spots Grantaire leaning against a water fountain at the other end of the hallway. Something wells up inside of him, and the uncomfortable churning sensation in his stomach starts up again. Combeferre had casually mentioned rooming plans for state earlier, and when Enjolras needs someone to breathe his frustration into, Grantaire is a _whole hallway_ away.

Maybe it’s their new shared sentiment—Enjolras now has a taste of being disappointed in himself like Grantaire feels every day—but he walks briskly over to Grantaire and accosts him with all the subtlety of a rampaging Courfeyrac.

“You didn’t call. I thought you would call,” he says without preamble.

“What, did you want to hear my voice whispering words of comfort into your ear?” Grantaire sneers.

Enjolras’s confidence falters for a minute, and he wonders why he ever thought this was a good idea. “Just because we broke up doesn’t mean you have to ignore me.”

“You said you were sorry,” Grantaire says, and the biting words sound like an accusation coming off his tongue.

The shift in conversation happens so abruptly that Enjolras recoils. “I _am._ I know I shouldn’t have accused you of being a traitor—you would never, and I was stressed. And—“ He lets out a frustrated breath. “That’s not an excuse, you deserve better than that, but.”

The sentence ends there because there’s nothing else to say. Grantaire deserves better, and it’s as simple as that. He’s not the flawless god Grantaire subconsciously holds him up to be, but shit, he’s not even the put-together boyfriend Grantaire thinks he wants.

“Just to start out, disclaimer. I’m not saying this so you’ll feel sorry for me. I don’t need any of that shit.” Grantaire looks away for a second, and when he looks back, Enjolras can see the newfound resolve in his eyes. “You said you were sorry, but you don’t even know why you should be.”

Enjolras stays silent, but he moves back to give Grantaire more room.

“My sister, the day you were working so hard on those cases, that was the anniversary of her death, and I just thought—maybe, if you could spare some _time_.” He smiles wryly, but it’s more like a defense mechanism than an expression of joy. “Yeah, well, I thought wrong.”

The revelation hits Enjolras like a punch to the gut, and his knees actually buckle before Grantaire’s arms are there, supporting him.

“You should have told me.”

“Would it have made a difference?”

“Yes,” Enjolras answers sharply, but Grantaire barely hears him.

“And you know what fucking _sucks shit_ , right now? I get it now. You’re capable of screwing up. You’re as fallible as the rest of us, maybe not like me, but no one’s as bad as I am.”

Enjolras nearly interjects with a quick reassurance, but that’s not what Grantaire needs right now.

Grantaire chuckles, a low, mirthless sound in his throat. “I know that now, but it sure as hell doesn’t make me feel better.” He seems small, edging away and closing down. “I thought it would.”

Grantaire is halfway to his class across the hall when he spins around, pinning Enjolras with something that’s nearly a glare but not quite. “Don’t try to contact me. If we talk, I’ll forgive you at just the slightest apology, and I—I really don’t want to forgive you.”

* * *

Courfeyrac has never been a particularly safe driver, but Enjolras is pretty sure that sports car—how the hell did he get a sports car anyway?—would only exacerbate his shitty driving habits. He only has one mantra when operating a motor vehicle, and it’s, “who gives a fuck?”

He hits the brakes hard when he nears Enjolras’s house, and the tires screech painfully as they skid against concrete. Still dressed in his pajamas, Enjolras throws the front door open with a bang and stands there on his porch, gaping.

Courfeyrac flings a wadded-up piece of paper at him, and it flies in the air in a high arc before landing neatly at Enjolras’s feet. He flattens it out against his thigh.

Enjolras’s eyes scan over the words quickly without really taking them in. “Is this what I think it is?”

“Yep,” Courfeyrac says, popping the ‘p’. “ _That_ is evidence that we just signed you up for your last chance to redeem yourself.”

An idea begins to form in Enjolras’s mind. This could be his chance to redeem himself on both of the battlefields he’s fighting on, but he doesn’t voice his hopes just yet.  

“B—but,” Enjolras sputters. “This was never on the tournament schedule. We don’t have enough money to sign up. And Lamarque wouldn’t let us pay out-of-pocket.”

“You’d be surprised at how far you can get ahead with a little bit of begging and Marius’s puppy eyes,” Combeferre chips in dryly.

Courfeyrac opens the door wide, pulling his sunglasses down his nose to glare at Enjolras over the top of the lenses. “Get in, loser. We’re going shopping.”

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to all who give feedback. :D You are the bomb dot com, seriously. If you want to contact me, go [here.](http://cossetcosette.tumblr.com/)


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